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Related papers: Variational Wasserstein gradient flow

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We propose a distributed nonparametric algorithm for solving measure-valued optimization problems with additive objectives. Such problems arise in several contexts in stochastic learning and control including Langevin sampling from an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-21 Iman Nodozi , Abhishek Halder

Numerous infinite dimensional dynamical systems arising in different fields have been shown to exhibit a gradient flow structure in the Wasserstein space. We construct Two Point Flux Approximation Finite Volume schemes discretizing such…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-06-29 Andrea Natale , Gabriele Todeschi

This paper introduces Wasserstein variational inference, a new form of approximate Bayesian inference based on optimal transport theory. Wasserstein variational inference uses a new family of divergences that includes both f-divergences and…

There has been recent interest in developing scalable Bayesian sampling methods such as stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) for big-data analysis. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-11 Changyou Chen , Ruiyi Zhang , Wenlin Wang , Bai Li , Liqun Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-29 Gabriele Visentin , Patrick Cheridito

Numerous applications of machine learning involve representing probability distributions over high-dimensional data. We propose autoregressive quantile flows, a flexible class of normalizing flow models trained using a novel objective based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Phillip Si , Allan Bishop , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Off-policy evaluation and learning are concerned with assessing a given policy and learning an optimal policy from offline data without direct interaction with the environment. Often, the environment in which the data are collected differs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Yi Shen , Pan Xu , Michael M. Zavlanos

We propose an algorithmic framework, that employs active subspace techniques, for scalable global optimization of functions with low effective dimension (also referred to as low-rank functions). This proposal replaces the original…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-01 Coralia Cartis , Xinzhu Liang , Estelle Massart , Adilet Otemissov

In this article we set up a splitting variant of the JKO scheme in order to handle gradient flows with respect to the Kantorovich-Fisher-Rao metric, recently introduced and defined on the space of positive Radon measure with varying masses.…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2018-05-08 Thomas Gallouët , Léonard Monsaingeon

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 show that the continuous-time gradient descent in Rn can be viewed as an optimal controlled evolution for a suitable action functional; a similar result holds for stochastic gradient descent. We then provide an analogous characterization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-03 Yongxin Chen , Tryphon Georgiou , Michele Pavon

Performativity means that the deployment of a predictive model incentivizes agents to strategically adapt their behavior, thereby inducing a model-dependent distribution shift. Practitioners often repeatedly retrain the model on data…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Siyi Wang , Zifan Wang , Karl H. Johansson

Sampling a probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental problem in computational science and engineering. This task may be cast as an optimization problem over all probability measures, and an initial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-12 Yifan Chen , Daniel Zhengyu Huang , Jiaoyang Huang , Sebastian Reich , Andrew M. Stuart

Bayesian optimal experimental design (BOED) provides a powerful, decision-theoretic framework for selecting experiments so as to maximise the expected utility of the data to be collected. In practice, however, its applicability can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-13 Louis Sharrock

Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) have gained attention in the Bayesian inference literature, for their capacity to yield flexible and accurate approximations. We explore ParVIs from the perspective of Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-17 Chang Liu , Jingwei Zhuo , Pengyu Cheng , Ruiyi Zhang , Jun Zhu , Lawrence Carin

We propose a variational form of the BDF2 method as an alternative to the commonly used minimizing movement scheme for the time-discrete approximation of gradient flows in abstract metric spaces. Assuming uniform semi-convexity --- but no…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2017-12-25 Daniel Matthes , Simon Plazotta

Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) use nonparametric variational families represented by particles to approximate the target distribution according to the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-24 Shiyue Zhang , Ziheng Cheng , Cheng Zhang

We construct a Wasserstein gradient flow of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and study its convergence properties. The MMD is an integral probability metric defined for a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), and serves as a metric on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-04 Michael Arbel , Anna Korba , Adil Salim , Arthur Gretton

Many decision problems in science, engineering and economics are affected by uncertain parameters whose distribution is only indirectly observable through samples. The goal of data-driven decision-making is to learn a decision from finitely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-05 Daniel Kuhn , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Viet Anh Nguyen , Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh

We introduce an ordinary differential equation (ODE) based deep generative method for learning conditional distributions, named Conditional F\"ollmer Flow. Starting from a standard Gaussian distribution, the proposed flow could approximate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-14 Jinyuan Chang , Zhao Ding , Yuling Jiao , Ruoxuan Li , Jerry Zhijian Yang