Related papers: The Barycenter Method for Direct Optimization: an …
Wasserstein Barycenter is a principled approach to represent the weighted mean of a given set of probability distributions, utilizing the geometry induced by optimal transport. In this work, we present a novel scalable algorithm to…
We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function in $\R^n$ in a setting where only function evaluations are possible. While importance sampling is one of the most popular techniques used by machine…
We study a general formulation of regularized Wasserstein barycenters that enjoys favorable regularity, approximation, stability and (grid-free) optimization properties. This barycenter is defined as the unique probability measure that…
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…
Efficiently aggregating data from different sources is a challenging problem, particularly when samples from each source are distributed differently. These differences can be inherent to the inference task or present for other reasons:…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
Local optimization presents a promising approach to expensive, high-dimensional black-box optimization by sidestepping the need to globally explore the search space. For objective functions whose gradient cannot be evaluated directly,…
A novel class of derivative-free optimization algorithms is developed. The main idea is to utilize certain non-commutative maps in order to approximate the gradient of the objective function. Convergence properties of the novel algorithms…
We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…
We present a model-based derivative-free method for optimization subject to general convex constraints, which we assume are unrelaxable and accessed only through a projection operator that is cheap to evaluate. We prove global convergence…
In this paper, we present a novel derivative-free optimization framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Many problems in fields ranging from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning involve settings…
The optimal transportation problem defines a geometry of probability measures which leads to a definition for weighted averages (barycenters) of measures, finding application in the machine learning and computer vision communities as a…
We present new algorithms to compute the mean of a set of empirical probability measures under the optimal transport metric. This mean, known as the Wasserstein barycenter, is the measure that minimizes the sum of its Wasserstein distances…
We present a novel method for efficiently computing optimal transport maps and Wasserstein barycenters in high-dimensional spaces. Our approach uses conditional normalizing flows to approximate the input distributions as invertible…
In this paper, a regularization of Wasserstein barycenters for random measures supported on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ is introduced via convex penalization. The existence and uniqueness of such barycenters is first proved for a large class of…
Aggregating data from multiple sources can be formalized as an Optimal Transport (OT) barycenter problem, which seeks to compute the average of probability distributions with respect to OT discrepancies. However, in real-world scenarios,…
Inspired by recent advances in distributed algorithms for approximating Wasserstein barycenters, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for this problem. The main novelty is that we consider time-varying computational networks, which are…
In this paper, we consider the problem of computing the barycenter of a set of probability distributions under the Sinkhorn divergence. This problem has recently found applications across various domains, including graphics, learning, and…
We present a novel algorithm to estimate the barycenter of arbitrary probability distributions with respect to the Sinkhorn divergence. Based on a Frank-Wolfe optimization strategy, our approach proceeds by populating the support of the…
We consider smooth stochastic convex optimization problems in the context of algorithms which are based on directional derivatives of the objective function. This context can be considered as an intermediate one between derivative-free…