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This paper studies minimax optimization problems defined over infinite-dimensional function classes of overparameterized two-layer neural networks. In particular, we consider the minimax optimization problem stemming from estimating linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Yuchen Zhu , Yufeng Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Xiaohong Chen

Motivated by variational inference methods, we propose a zeroth-order algorithm for solving optimization problems in the space of Gaussian probability measures. The algorithm is based on an interacting system of Gaussian particles that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Giacomo Borghi , José A. Carrillo

A novel algorithm is proposed to solve the sample-based optimal transport problem. An adversarial formulation of the push-forward condition uses a test function built as a convolution between an adaptive kernel and an evolving probability…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-11 Daeyoung Kim , Esteban G. Tabak

We propose a new algorithm that uses an auxiliary neural network to express the potential of the optimal transport map between two data distributions. In the sequel, we use the aforementioned map to train generative networks. Unlike WGANs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-21 Vaios Laschos , Jan Tinapp , Klaus Obermayer

This paper studies distributional model risk in marginal problems, where each marginal measure is assumed to lie in a Wasserstein ball centered at a fixed reference measure with a given radius. Theoretically, we establish several…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-04 Yanqin Fan , Hyeonseok Park , Gaoqian Xu

We propose a new method to estimate Wasserstein distances and optimal transport plans between two probability distributions from samples in high dimension. Unlike plug-in rules that simply replace the true distributions by their empirical…

Optimal transport provides an inherently geometric and highly structured framework for studying spaces of probability measures, supplying a rich theoretical toolkit for contemporary statistics, machine learning, and generative modelling. In…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-21 Riccardo Passeggeri , Rohan M. Shenoy , Pengcheng Ye

In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $\pi$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Luca Ghafourpour , Sinho Chewi , Alessio Figalli , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

The optimal transport (OT) problem is a classical optimization problem having the form of linear programming. Machine learning applications put forward new computational challenges in its solution. In particular, the OT problem defines a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-25 Nazarii Tupitsa , Pavel Dvurechensky , Darina Dvinskikh , Alexander Gasnikov

We develop a theory of finite-dimensional polyhedral subsets over the Wasserstein space and optimization of functionals over them via first-order methods. Our main application is to the problem of mean-field variational inference, which…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Yiheng Jiang , Sinho Chewi , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

Given a collection of probability measures, a practitioner sometimes needs to find an "average" distribution which adequately aggregates reference distributions. A theoretically appealing notion of such an average is the Wasserstein…

Optimal Transport (OT) has attracted significant interest in the machine learning community, not only for its ability to define meaningful distances between probability distributions -- such as the Wasserstein distance -- but also for its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Laetitia Chapel , Romain Tavenard , Samuel Vaiter

This paper presents a Wasserstein attraction approach for solving dynamic mass transport problems over networks. In the transport problem over networks, we start with a distribution over the set of nodes that needs to be "transported" to a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-28 Ferran Arqué , César A. Uribe , Carlos Ocampo-Martinez

Optimal transport (OT) defines a powerful framework to compare probability distributions in a geometrically faithful way. However, the practical impact of OT is still limited because of its computational burden. We propose a new class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-30 Genevay Aude , Marco Cuturi , Gabriel Peyré , Francis Bach

In this article, we formulate topology optimization problems concerning the mass distribution as minimization problems for functionals on the Wasserstein space. We relax optimization problems regarding non-convex objective functions on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-22 Fumiya Okazaki , Takayuki Yamada

Optimal transport (OT) finds a least cost transport plan between two probability distributions using a cost matrix defined on pairs of points. Unlike standard OT, which infers unstructured pointwise mappings, low-rank optimal transport…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Henri Schmidt , Peter Halmos , Ben Raphael

Many scientific systems, such as cellular populations or economic cohorts, are naturally described by probability distributions that evolve over time. Predicting how such a system would have evolved under different forces or initial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-26 Tristan Luca Saidi , Gonzalo Mena , Larry Wasserman , Florian Gunsilius

We consider a distributionally robust second-order stochastic dominance constrained optimization problem. We require the dominance constraints hold with respect to all probability distributions in a Wasserstein ball centered at the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-20 Yu Mei , Jia Liu , Zhiping Chen

A data-driven formulation of the optimal transport problem is presented and solved using adaptively refined meshes to decompose the problem into a sequence of finite linear programming problems. Both the marginal distributions and their…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-10-11 Weikun Chen , Esteban G. Tabak

Optimal transport has recently proved to be a useful tool in various machine learning applications needing comparisons of probability measures. Among these, applications of distributionally robust optimization naturally involve Wasserstein…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-24 Waïss Azizian , Franck Iutzeler , Jérôme Malick