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Related papers: Variational Wasserstein gradient flow

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Solving Fredholm equations of the first kind is crucial in many areas of the applied sciences. In this work we adopt a probabilistic and variational point of view by considering a minimization problem in the space of probability measures…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-17 Francesca R. Crucinio , Valentin De Bortoli , Arnaud Doucet , Adam M. Johansen

Wasserstein gradient flow provides a general framework for minimizing an energy functional $J$ over the space of probability measures on a Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$. Its canonical time-discretization, the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Peter Halmos , Boris Hanin

We present a novel multiscale framework for analyzing sequences of probability measures in Wasserstein spaces over Euclidean domains. Exploiting the intrinsic geometry of optimal transport, we construct a multiscale transform applicable to…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-13 Wael Mattar , Nir Sharon

Gradient flow in the 2-Wasserstein space is widely used to optimize functionals over probability distributions and is typically implemented using an interacting particle system with $n$ particles. Analyzing these algorithms requires showing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Chandan Tankala , Dheeraj M. Nagaraj , Anant Raj

Distributionally-robust optimization is often studied for a fixed set of distributions rather than time-varying distributions that can drift significantly over time (which is, for instance, the case in finance and sociology due to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-01 Iman Shames , Farhad Farokhi

Sampling from nonsmooth target probability distributions is essential in various applications, including the Bayesian Lasso. We propose a splitting-based sampling algorithm for the time-implicit discretization of the probability flow for…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-14 Fuqun Han , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

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

We propose a fully discrete variational scheme for nonlinear evolution equations with gradient flow structure on the space of finite Radon measures on an interval with respect to a generalized version of the Wasserstein distance with…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-09-29 Jonathan Zinsl , Daniel Matthes

This work is the third part of a program initiated in arXiv:2111.13258, arXiv:2302.06571 aiming at the development of an intrinsic geometric well-posedness theory for Hamilton-Jacobi equations related to controlled gradient flow problems in…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-02-02 Giovanni Conforti , Richard C. Kraaij , Luca Tamanini , Daniela Tonon

Wasserstein gradient and Hamiltonian flows have emerged as essential tools for modeling complex dynamics in the natural sciences, with applications ranging from partial differential equations (PDEs) and optimal transport to quantum…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Jianyu Hu , Juan-Pablo Ortega , Daiying Yin

Inspired by the gradient flow viewpoint of the Landau equation and the corresponding dynamic formulation of the Landau metric in [arXiv:2007.08591], we develop a novel implicit particle method for the Landau equation in the framework of the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-01 Yan Huang , Li Wang

We study the connection between a system of many independent Brownian particles on one hand and the deterministic diffusion equation on the other. For a fixed time step $h>0$, a large-deviations rate functional $J_h$ characterizes the…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-05-18 Stefan Adams , Nicolas Dirr , Mark Peletier , Johannes Zimmer

Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO) is a recently proposed reinforcement learning algorithm that leverages Wasserstein gradient flows to optimize stochastic policies in continuous action spaces. Despite its empirical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 David Šiška , Yufei Zhang

As a counterpoint to recent numerical methods for crystal surface evolution, which agree well with microscopic dynamics but suffer from significant stiffness that prevents simulation on fine spatial grids, we develop a new numerical method…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-06-24 Katy Craig , Jian-Guo Liu , Jianfeng Lu , Jeremy L. Marzuola , Li Wang

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

Wasserstein gradient flow (WGF) is a common method to perform optimization over the space of probability measures. While WGF is guaranteed to converge to a first-order stationary point, for nonconvex functionals the converged solution does…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Naoya Yamamoto , Juno Kim , Taiji Suzuki

In this paper, we study the Wasserstein gradient flow structure of the porous medium equation. We prove that, for the case of $q$-Gaussians on the real line, the functional derived by the JKO-discretization scheme is asymptotically…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2013-07-22 Manh Hong Duong

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-26 Ziheng Cheng , Shiyue Zhang , Longlin Yu , Cheng Zhang

We study estimation problems in safety-critical applications with streaming data. Since estimation problems can be posed as optimization problems in the probability space, we devise a stochastic projected Wasserstein gradient flow that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-07 Nicolas Lanzetti , Efe C. Balta , Dominic Liao-McPherson , Florian Dörfler

We provide a numerical analysis and computation of neural network projected schemes for approximating one dimensional Wasserstein gradient flows. We approximate the Lagrangian mapping functions of gradient flows by the class of two-layer…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-02-27 Xinzhe Zuo , Jiaxi Zhao , Shu Liu , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li