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Optimal Transport (OT) distances are now routinely used as loss functions in ML tasks. Yet, computing OT distances between arbitrary (i.e. not necessarily discrete) probability distributions remains an open problem. This paper introduces a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-03 Arthur Mensch , Gabriel Peyré

Multi-marginal optimal transport enables one to compare multiple probability measures, which increasingly finds application in multi-task learning problems. One practical limitation of multi-marginal transport is computational scalability…

Optimal transport is the problem of designing a joint distribution for two random variables with fixed marginals. In virtually the entire literature on this topic, the objective is to minimize expected cost. This paper is the first to study…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-13 Yinchu Zhu , Ilya O. Ryzhov

We present a flow-based approach to the optimal transport (OT) problem between two continuous distributions $\pi_0,\pi_1$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, of minimizing a transport cost $\mathbb{E}[c(X_1-X_0)]$ in the set of couplings $(X_0,X_1)$ whose…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-30 Qiang Liu

We propose a simple subsampling scheme for fast randomized approximate computation of optimal transport distances. This scheme operates on a random subset of the full data and can use any exact algorithm as a black-box back-end, including…

Computation · Statistics 2020-12-17 Max Sommerfeld , Jörn Schrieber , Yoav Zemel , Axel Munk

Semi-discrete optimal transport problems, which evaluate the Wasserstein distance between a discrete and a generic (possibly non-discrete) probability measure, are believed to be computationally hard. Even though such problems are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-02 Bahar Taskesen , Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh , Daniel Kuhn

Estimating Wasserstein distances between two high-dimensional densities suffers from the curse of dimensionality: one needs an exponential (wrt dimension) number of samples to ensure that the distance between two empirical measures is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-13 François-Pierre Paty , Alexandre d'Aspremont , Marco Cuturi

We investigate the semi-discrete Optimal Transport (OT) problem, where a continuous source measure $\mu$ is transported to a discrete target measure $\nu$, with particular attention to the OT map approximation. In this setting, Stochastic…

Optimal transportation, or computing the Wasserstein or ``earth mover's'' distance between two distributions, is a fundamental primitive which arises in many learning and statistical settings. We give an algorithm which solves this problem…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Arun Jambulapati , Aaron Sidford , Kevin Tian

Optimal transport distances (OT) have been widely used in recent work in Machine Learning as ways to compare probability distributions. These are costly to compute when the data lives in high dimension. Recent work by Paty et al., 2019,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Patric M. Fulop , Vincent Danos

We present a toolkit of directed distances between quantile functions. By employing this, we solve some new optimal transport (OT) problems which e.g. considerably flexibilize some prominent OTs expressed through Wasserstein distances.

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Wolfgang Stummer

We study discretizations of Hamiltonian systems on the probability density manifold equipped with the $L^2$-Wasserstein metric. Based on discrete optimal transport theory, several Hamiltonian systems on graph (lattice) with different…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-06-17 Jianbo Cui , Luca Dieci , Haomin Zhou

This chapter describes techniques for the numerical resolution of optimal transport problems. We will consider several discretizations of these problems, and we will put a strong focus on the mathematical analysis of the algorithms to solve…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-03-03 Quentin Merigot , Boris Thibert

Optimal Transport (OT) problems arise in a wide range of applications, from physics to economics. Getting numerical approximate solution of these problems is a challenging issue of practical importance. In this work, we investigate the…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-05-15 Aurélien Alfonsi , Rafaël Coyaud , Virginie Ehrlacher , Damiano Lombardi

This paper investigates the semi-discrete optimal transport (OT) problem with entropic regularization. We characterize the solution using a governing, well-posed ordinary differential equation (ODE). This naturally yields an algorithm to…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-04-07 Luca Nenna , Daniyar Omarov , Brendan Pass

In recent years, the machine learning community has increasingly embraced the optimal transport (OT) framework for modeling distributional relationships. In this work, we introduce a sample-based neural solver for computing the Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Hailiang Liu , Yan-Han Chen

Optimal transport has gained significant attention in recent years due to its effectiveness in deep learning and computer vision. Its descendant metric, the Wasserstein distance, has been particularly successful in measuring distribution…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-18 Kaiwen Shi

Comparing time series in a principled manner requires capturing both temporal alignment and distributional similarity of features. Optimal transport (OT) has recently emerged as a powerful tool for this task, but existing OT-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-29 Thai P. D. Nguyen , Hong T. M. Chu , Kim-Chuan Toh

Optimal transport distances are powerful tools to compare probability distributions and have found many applications in machine learning. Yet their algorithmic complexity prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. To overcome this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-14 Kilian Fatras , Younes Zine , Rémi Flamary , Rémi Gribonval , Nicolas Courty

The discrete optimal transport (OT) problem, which offers an effective computational tool for comparing two discrete probability distributions, has recently attracted much attention and played essential roles in many modern applications.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-20 Di Hou , Ling Liang , Kim-Chuan Toh