Related papers: Projected Wasserstein gradient descent for high-di…

This paper studies the optimization of the KL functional on the Wasserstein space of probability measures, and develops a sampling framework based on Wasserstein gradient descent (WGD). We identify two important subclasses of the…

The curse of dimensionality is a longstanding challenge in Bayesian inference in high dimensions. In this work, we propose a projected Stein variational gradient descent (pSVGD) method to overcome this challenge by exploiting the…

We develop a fast and scalable numerical approach to solve Wasserstein gradient flows (WGFs), particularly suitable for high-dimensional cases. Our approach is to use general reduced-order models, like deep neural networks, to parameterize…

Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) update the particles based on the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, the design of…

Variational inference, such as the mean-field (MF) approximation, requires certain conjugacy structures for efficient computation. These can impose unnecessary restrictions on the viable prior distribution family and further constraints on…

We address the optimization problem of simultaneously minimizing multiple objective functionals over a family of probability distributions. This type of Multi-Objective Distributional Optimization commonly arises in machine learning and…

Recently, Deng et al. (2026) proposed Generative Modeling via Drifting (GMD), a novel framework for generative tasks. This note presents an analysis of GMD through the lens of Wasserstein Gradient Flows (WGF), i.e., the path of steepest…

We propose efficient numerical schemes for implementing the natural gradient descent (NGD) for a broad range of metric spaces with applications to PDE-based optimization problems. Our technique represents the natural gradient direction as a…

Wasserstein distance (WD) and the associated optimal transport plan have been proven useful in many applications where probability measures are at stake. In this paper, we propose a new proxy of the squared WD, coined min-SWGG, that is…

In this work, we propose a numerical method to compute the Wasserstein Hamiltonian flow (WHF), which is a Hamiltonian system on the probability density manifold. Many well-known PDE systems can be reformulated as WHFs. We use parameterized…

Motivated by approximation Bayesian computation using mean-field variational approximation and the computation of equilibrium in multi-species systems with cross-interaction, this paper investigates the composite geodesically convex…

Optimization over the space of probability measures endowed with the Wasserstein-2 geometry is central to modern machine learning and mean-field modeling. However, traditional methods relying on full Wasserstein gradients often suffer from…

Wasserstein gradient flows are continuous time dynamics that define curves of steepest descent to minimize an objective function over the space of probability measures (i.e., the Wasserstein space). This objective is typically a divergence…

Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution…

We develop a projected Wasserstein distance for the two-sample test, a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning: given two sets of samples, to determine whether they are from the same distribution. In particular, we aim to…

We compute the ground state $u$ of the Gross--Pitaevskii equation (GPE) via Wasserstein gradient descent in diffeomorphism space. We represent the density $\rho=u^2$ as the push-forward of a fixed reference measure through a parameterized…

We examine the infinite-dimensional optimization problem of finding a decomposition of a probability measure into K probability sub-measures to minimize specific loss functions inspired by applications in clustering and user grouping. We…

In this paper we propose and analyze a novel multilevel version of Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). SVGD is a recent particle based variational inference method. For Bayesian inverse problems with computationally expensive…

Gaussian processes (GPs) are a well-known nonparametric Bayesian inference technique, but they suffer from scalability problems for large sample sizes, and their performance can degrade for non-stationary or spatially heterogeneous data. In…

The Wasserstein distance has become increasingly important in machine learning and deep learning. Despite its popularity, the Wasserstein distance is hard to approximate because of the curse of dimensionality. A recently proposed approach…