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Related papers: Large-Scale Wasserstein Gradient Flows

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This is an expository paper on the theory of gradient flows, and in particular of those PDEs which can be interpreted as gradient flows for the Wasserstein metric on the space of probability measures (a distance induced by optimal…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2016-09-14 Filippo Santambrogio

We propose a mathematically principled PDE gradient flow framework for distributionally robust optimization (DRO). Exploiting the recent advances in the intersection of Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling and gradient flow theory, we show…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Zusen Xu , Jia-Jie Zhu

Gradient flows of the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence, such as the Fokker--Planck equation and Stein Variational Gradient Descent, evolve a distribution toward a target density known only up to a normalizing constant. We introduce new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-09 Elias Hess-Childs , Dejan Slepčev , Lantian Xu

We analyze the gradient flow of a potential energy in the space of probability measures when we substitute the optimal transport geometry with a geometry based on Sinkhorn divergences, a debiased version of entropic optimal transport. This…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-11-19 Mathis Hardion , Hugo Lavenant

We study the particle method to approximate the gradient flow on the $L^p$-Wasserstein space. This method relies on the discretization of the energy introduced by [3] via nonoverlapping balls centered at the particles and preserves the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-01-08 Rong Lei

Algorithms based on discretizing Langevin diffusion are popular tools for sampling from high-dimensional distributions. We develop novel connections between such Monte Carlo algorithms, the theory of Wasserstein gradient flow, and the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-05-13 Espen Bernton

We modify the JKO scheme, which is a time discretization of Wasserstein gradient flows, by replacing the Wasserstein distance with more general transport costs on manifolds. We show when the cost function has a mixed Hessian which defines a…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-02-28 Cale Rankin , Ting-Kam Leonard Wong

The so-called JKO scheme, named after Jordan, Kinderlehrer and Otto, provides a variational way to construct discrete time approximations of certain partial differential equations (PDEs) appearing as gradient flows in the space of…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-04-10 Aymeric Baradat , Sofiane Cherf

We propose a new semi-discretization scheme to approximate nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations, by exploiting the gradient flow structures with respect to the 2-Wasserstein metric. We discretize the underlying state by a finite graph and…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-12-20 Shui-Nee Chow , Luca Dieci , Wuchen Li , Haomin Zhou

Variational inference (VI) can be cast as an optimization problem in which the variational parameters are tuned to closely align a variational distribution with the true posterior. The optimization task can be approached through vanilla…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Dai Hai Nguyen , Tetsuya Sakurai , Hiroshi Mamitsuka

We consider a Fokker-Planck equation which is coupled to an externally given time-dependent constraint on its first moment. This constraint introduces a Lagrange-multiplier which renders the equation nonlocal and nonlinear. In this paper we…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2018-11-28 Simon Eberle , Barbara Niethammer , André Schlichting

The normalization constraint on probability density poses a significant challenge for solving the Fokker-Planck equation. Normalizing Flow, an invertible generative model leverages the change of variables formula to ensure probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Feng Liu , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

The method of choice for integrating the time-dependent Fokker-Planck equation in high-dimension is to generate samples from the solution via integration of the associated stochastic differential equation. Here, we study an alternative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Nicholas M. Boffi , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

In order to sample from an unnormalized probability density function, we propose to combine continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) with rejection-resampling steps based on importance weights. We relate the iterative training of CNFs with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-14 Johannes Hertrich , Robert Gruhlke

Combining the classical theory of optimal transport with modern operator splitting techniques, we develop a new numerical method for nonlinear, nonlocal partial differential equations, arising in models of porous media, materials science,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-02-09 Jose A. Carrillo , Katy Craig , Li Wang , Chaozhen Wei

Motivated by a recent method for approximate solution of Fredholm equations of the first kind, we develop a corresponding method for a class of Fredholm equations of the \emph{second kind}. In particular, we consider the class of equations…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-19 Francesca R. Crucinio , Adam M. Johansen

We propose a variational scheme for computing Wasserstein gradient flows. The scheme builds upon the Jordan--Kinderlehrer--Otto framework with the Benamou-Brenier's dynamic formulation of the quadratic Wasserstein metric and adds a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-07-15 Wuchen Li , Jianfeng Lu , Li Wang

In this paper, we develop and analyze numerical methods for high dimensional Fokker-Planck equations by leveraging generative models from deep learning. Our starting point is a formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation as a system of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Shu Liu , Wuchen Li , Hongyuan Zha , Haomin Zhou

Motivated by recent work on approximation of diffusion equations by deterministic interacting particle systems, we develop a nonlocal approximation for a range of linear and nonlinear diffusion equations and prove convergence of the method…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-04-05 Katy Craig , Matt Jacobs , Olga Turanova

We present a discretization-free scalable framework for solving a large class of mass-conserving partial differential equations (PDEs), including the time-dependent Fokker-Planck equation and the Wasserstein gradient flow. The main…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Lingxiao Li , Samuel Hurault , Justin Solomon