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Related papers: Variational Wasserstein gradient flow

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We develop a new computational framework to solve the partial differential equations (PDEs) governing the flow of the joint probability density functions (PDFs) in continuous-time stochastic nonlinear systems. The need for computing the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-08-08 Kenneth F. Caluya , Abhishek Halder

We introduce a novel unit-time ordinary differential equation (ODE) flow called the preconditioned F\"{o}llmer flow, which efficiently transforms a Gaussian measure into a desired target measure at time 1. To discretize the flow, we apply…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-08 Zhao Ding , Yuling Jiao , Xiliang Lu , Zhijian Yang , Cheng Yuan

The theory of Wasserstein gradient flows in the space of probability measures has made an enormous progress over the last twenty years. It constitutes a unified and powerful framework in the study of dissipative partial differential…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2022-01-17 Daniel Adams , Manh Hong Duong , Goncalo dos Reis

This paper provides a formulation of the log-homotopy particle flow from the perspective of variational inference. We show that the transient density used to derive the particle flow follows a time-scaled trajectory of the Fisher-Rao…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-06 Yinzhuang Yi , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

In this paper, we start from a very natural system of cross-diffusion equations, which can be seen as a gradient flow for the Wasserstein distance of a certain functional. Unfortunately, the cross-diffusion system is not well-posed, as a…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2023-07-07 Romain Ducasse , Filippo Santambrogio , Havva Yoldaş

Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-24 Anna Korba , Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski , Szymon Majewski , Pierre Ablin

We consider stochastic programs where the distribution of the uncertain parameters is only observable through a finite training dataset. Using the Wasserstein metric, we construct a ball in the space of (multivariate and non-discrete)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-06-14 Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Daniel Kuhn

Estimating the density of a distribution from samples is a fundamental problem in statistics. In many practical settings, the Wasserstein distance is an appropriate error metric for density estimation. For example, when estimating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Vitaly Feldman , Audra McMillan , Satchit Sivakumar , Kunal Talwar

Inverse problems in physical or biological sciences often involve recovering an unknown parameter that is random. The sought-after quantity is a probability distribution of the unknown parameter, that produces data that aligns with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-02 Qin Li , Maria Oprea , Li Wang , Yunan Yang

Recently, optimization on the Riemannian manifold have provided valuable insights to the optimization community. In this regard, extending these methods to to the Wasserstein space is of particular interest, since optimization on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Mingyang Yi , Bohan Wang

We consider a nonlinear fourth-order diffusion equation that arises in denoising of image densities. We propose an implicit time-stepping scheme that employs a primal-dual method for computing the subgradient of the total variation…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2013-05-24 Martin Benning , Luca Calatroni , Bertram Düring , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-15 Danilo Jimenez Rezende , Shakir Mohamed

In this paper, we study efficient approximate sampling for probability distributions known up to normalization constants. We specifically focus on a problem class arising in Bayesian inference for large-scale inverse problems in science and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Yifan Chen , Daniel Zhengyu Huang , Jiaoyang Huang , Sebastian Reich , Andrew M. Stuart

We propose a new method to obtain kinetic properties of infrequent events from molecular dynamics simulation. The procedure employs a recently introduced variational approach [Valsson and Parrinello, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 090601 (2014)] to…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-08-19 James McCarty , Omar Valsson , Pratyush Tiwary , Michele Parrinello

We give a comprehensive description of Wasserstein gradient flows of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) functionals $\mathcal F_\nu := \text{MMD}_K^2(\cdot, \nu)$ towards given target measures $\nu$ on the real line, where we focus on the…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-12-05 Richard Duong , Viktor Stein , Robert Beinert , Johannes Hertrich , Gabriele Steidl

We study multi-objective optimization over probability distributions in Wasserstein space. Recently, Nguyen et al. (2025) introduced Multiple Wasserstein Gradient Descent (MWGraD) algorithm, which exploits the geometric structure of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Dai Hai Nguyen , Duc Dung Nguyen , Atsuyoshi Nakamura , Hiroshi Mamitsuka

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

The dynamical formulation of the optimal transport can be extended through various choices of the underlying geometry (kinetic energy), and the regularization of density paths (potential energy). These combinations yield different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Kirill Neklyudov , Rob Brekelmans , Alexander Tong , Lazar Atanackovic , Qiang Liu , Alireza Makhzani

We propose a novel approach to the problem of multilevel clustering, which aims to simultaneously partition data in each group and discover grouping patterns among groups in a potentially large hierarchically structured corpus of data. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-26 Viet Huynh , Nhat Ho , Nhan Dam , XuanLong Nguyen , Mikhail Yurochkin , Hung Bui , and Dinh Phung

Approximating a probability distribution using a set of particles is a fundamental problem in machine learning and statistics, with applications including clustering and quantization. Formally, we seek a weighted mixture of Dirac measures…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-24 Ayoub Belhadji , Daniel Sharp , Youssef Marzouk