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The theory of optimal transport of probability measures has wide-ranging applications across a number of different fields, including concentration of measure, machine learning, Markov chains, and economics. The generalisation of optimal…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-04-21 Emily Beatty

The Wasserstein distance, rooted in optimal transport (OT) theory, is a popular discrepancy measure between probability distributions with various applications to statistics and machine learning. Despite their rich structure and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-02 Sloan Nietert , Rachel Cummings , Ziv Goldfeld

We provide theoretical complexity analysis for new algorithms to compute the optimal transport (OT) distance between two discrete probability distributions, and demonstrate their favorable practical performance over state-of-art primal-dual…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Wenshuo Guo , Nhat Ho , Michael I. Jordan

Optimal transport (\OT) theory defines a powerful set of tools to compare probability distributions. \OT~suffers however from a few drawbacks, computational and statistical, which have encouraged the proposal of several regularized variants…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Tam Le , Makoto Yamada , Kenji Fukumizu , Marco Cuturi

We study the problem of minimizing the Wasserstein distance between a probability distribution and an algebraic variety. We consider the setting of finite state spaces and describe the solution depending on the choice of the ground metric…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-15 T. Ö. Çelik , A. Jamneshan , G. Montúfar , B. Sturmfels , L. Venturello

Variational problems that involve Wasserstein distances and more generally optimal transport (OT) theory are playing an increasingly important role in data sciences. Such problems can be used to form an examplar measure out of various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Marco Cuturi , Gabriel Peyré

Optimal Transport has received much attention in Machine Learning as it allows to compare probability distributions by exploiting the geometry of the underlying space. However, in its original formulation, solving this problem suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Clément Bonet

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

Optimal transport (OT) is a versatile framework for comparing probability measures, with many applications to statistics, machine learning, and applied mathematics. However, OT distances suffer from computational and statistical scalability…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-08 Ziv Goldfeld , Kengo Kato , Gabriel Rioux , Ritwik Sadhu

We propose a fast algorithm for the calculation of the Wasserstein-1 distance, which is a particular type of optimal transport distance with homogeneous of degree one transport cost. Our algorithm is built on multilevel primal-dual…

Computation · Statistics 2019-08-06 Jialin Liu , Wotao Yin , Wuchen Li , Yat Tin Chow

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

We propose a new formulation and learning strategy for computing the Wasserstein geodesic between two probability distributions in high dimensions. By applying the method of Lagrange multipliers to the dynamic formulation of the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Shu Liu , Shaojun Ma , Yongxin Chen , Hongyuan Zha , Haomin Zhou

Optimal transport (OT), and in particular the Wasserstein distance, has seen a surge of interest and applications in machine learning. However, empirical approximation under Wasserstein distances suffers from a severe curse of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-01-28 Ziv Goldfeld , Kristjan Greenewald

Optimal transport (OT) and the related Wasserstein metric (W) are powerful and ubiquitous tools for comparing distributions. However, computing pairwise Wasserstein distances rapidly becomes intractable as cohort size grows. An attractive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Doron Haviv , Russell Zhang Kunes , Thomas Dougherty , Cassandra Burdziak , Tal Nawy , Anna Gilbert , Dana Pe'er

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

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

Wasserstein distances are metrics on probability distributions inspired by the problem of optimal mass transportation. Roughly speaking, they measure the minimal effort required to reconfigure the probability mass of one distribution in…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-04-10 Victor M. Panaretos , Yoav Zemel

Computing optimal transport (OT) between measures in high dimensions is doomed by the curse of dimensionality. A popular approach to avoid this curse is to project input measures on lower-dimensional subspaces (1D lines in the case of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Boris Muzellec , Marco Cuturi

In this work, we propose a novel machine learning approach to compute the optimal transport map between two continuous distributions from their unpaired samples, based on the DeepParticle methods. The proposed method leads to a min-min…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-01 Yingyuan Li , Aokun Wang , Zhongjian Wang

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