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We consider the problem of sampling from a distribution governed by a potential function. This work proposes an explicit score based MCMC method that is deterministic, resulting in a deterministic evolution for particles rather than a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-03 Hong Ye Tan , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

This manuscript introduces a regression-type formulation for approximating the Perron-Frobenius Operator by relying on distributional snapshots of data. These snapshots may represent densities of particles. The Wasserstein metric is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-03 Amirhossein Karimi , Tryphon T. Georgiou

We consider the problem of approximating partition functions for Ising models. We make use of recent tools in combinatorial optimization: the Sherali-Adams and Lasserre convex programming hierarchies, in combination with variational methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-13 Andrej Risteski

This paper proposes a distributionally robust approach to logistic regression. We use the Wasserstein distance to construct a ball in the space of probability distributions centered at the uniform distribution on the training samples. If…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-12-02 Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Daniel Kuhn

Particle-based methods include a variety of techniques, such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), for approximating a probabilistic target distribution with a set of weighted particles. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-03 Hadi Mohasel Afshar , Gilad Francis , Sally Cripps

Optimal Transport (OT) metrics allow for defining discrepancies between two probability measures. Wasserstein distance is for longer the celebrated OT-distance frequently-used in the literature, which seeks probability distributions to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Mokhtar Z. Alaya , Gilles Gasso , Maxime Berar , Alain Rakotomamonjy

Distributionally robust supervised learning (DRSL) is emerging as a key paradigm for building reliable machine learning systems for real-world applications -- reflecting the need for classifiers and predictive models that are robust to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-26 Yaodong Yu , Tianyi Lin , Eric Mazumdar , Michael I. Jordan

Adapting large-scale foundation models to new domains with limited supervision remains a fundamental challenge due to latent distribution mismatch, unstable optimization dynamics, and miscalibrated uncertainty propagation. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Aueaphum Aueawatthanaphisut , Kuepon Auewattanapisut

In this paper, we consider the problem of propagating an uncertain distribution by a possibly non-linear function and quantifying the resulting uncertainty. We measure the uncertainty using the Wasserstein distance, and for a given input…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-13 Eduardo Figueiredo , Steven Adams , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Luca Laurenti

We introduce a novel, geometry-aware distance metric for the family of von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions, which are fundamental models for directional data on the unit hypersphere. Although the vMF distribution is widely employed in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-22 Kisung You , Dennis Shung , Mauro Giuffrè

Collaborative learning has recently achieved very significant results. It still suffers, however, from several issues, including the type of information that needs to be exchanged, the criteria for stopping and how to choose the right…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-29 Fatima Ezzahraa Ben Bouazza , Younès Bennani

We consider a minimax problem motivated by distributionally robust optimization (DRO) when the worst-case distribution is continuous, leading to significant computational challenges due to the infinite-dimensional nature of the optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-31 Linglingzhi Zhu , Yao Xie

Optimal transport (OT) distances are increasingly used as loss functions for statistical inference, notably in the learning of generative models or supervised learning. Yet, the behavior of minimum Wasserstein estimators is poorly…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-07-20 Tianyi Lin , Zeyu Zheng , Elynn Y. Chen , Marco Cuturi , Michael I. Jordan

This paper discusses a class of combinatorial optimization problems with uncertain costs in the objective function. It is assumed that a sample of the cost realizations is available, which defines an empirical probability distribution for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-21 Marcel Jackiewicz , Adam Kasperski , Pawel Zielinski

In this work, we consider a sequence of stochastic optimization problems following a time-varying distribution via the lens of online optimization. Assuming that the loss function satisfies the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz condition, we apply…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-19 Yuen-Man Pun , Farhad Farokhi , Iman Shames

Inverse problems in physical or biological sciences often involve recovering an unknown parameter that is random. The sought-after quantity is a probability distribution of the unknown parameter, that produces data that aligns with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-02 Qin Li , Maria Oprea , Li Wang , Yunan Yang

We propose a new approach to measuring the agreement between two oscillatory time series, such as seismic waveforms, and demonstrate that it can be employed effectively in inverse problems. Our approach is based on Optimal Transport theory…

Geophysics · Physics 2022-07-01 Malcolm Sambridge , Andrew Jackson , Andrew P. Valentine

We study Fokker--Planck equations with symmetric, positive definite mobility matrices capturing diffusion in heterogeneous environments. A weighted Wasserstein metric is introduced for which these equations are gradient flows. This metric…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-19 Hailiang Liu , Athanasios E. Tzavaras

The proximal algorithm is a powerful tool to minimize nonlinear and nonsmooth functionals in a general metric space. Motivated by the recent progress in studying the training dynamics of the noisy gradient descent algorithm on two-layer…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Shuailong Zhu , Xiaohui Chen

Given a family of probability measures in P(X), the space of probability measures on a Hilbert space X, our goal in this paper is to highlight one ore more curves in P(X) that summarize efficiently that family. We propose to study this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-11-24 Vivien Seguy , Marco Cuturi