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Optimal transport is a notoriously difficult problem to solve numerically, with current approaches often remaining intractable for very large scale applications such as those encountered in machine learning. Wasserstein barycenters -- the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-25 Julien Lacombe , Julie Digne , Nicolas Courty , Nicolas Bonneel

Optimal transport (OT) barycenters are a mathematically grounded way of averaging probability distributions while capturing their geometric properties. In short, the barycenter task is to take the average of a collection of probability…

Obtaining solutions to Optimal Transportation (OT) problems is typically intractable when the marginal spaces are continuous. Recent research has focused on approximating continuous solutions with discretization methods based on i.i.d.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-17 Junqi Wang , Pei Wang , Patrick Shafto

The optimal transport (OT) problem is a classical optimization problem having the form of linear programming. Machine learning applications put forward new computational challenges in its solution. In particular, the OT problem defines a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-25 Nazarii Tupitsa , Pavel Dvurechensky , Darina Dvinskikh , Alexander Gasnikov

Discrete Wasserstein barycenters correspond to optimal solutions of transportation problems for a set of probability measures with finite support. Discrete barycenters are measures with finite support themselves and exhibit two favorable…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-24 Steffen Borgwardt

Multi-marginal Optimal Transport (mOT), a generalization of OT, aims at minimizing the integral of a cost function with respect to a distribution with some prescribed marginals. In this paper, we consider an entropic version of mOT with a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-31 Maxence Noble , Valentin De Bortoli , Arnaud Doucet , Alain Durmus

Wasserstein barycenter, built on the theory of optimal transport, provides a powerful framework to aggregate probability distributions, and it has increasingly attracted great attention within the machine learning community. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Jinjin Chi , Zhiyao Yang , Jihong Ouyang , Ximing Li

Optimal transport is a foundational problem in optimization, that allows to compare probability distributions while taking into account geometric aspects. Its optimal objective value, the Wasserstein distance, provides an important loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-21 Marin Ballu , Quentin Berthet , Francis Bach

We study multi-marginal optimal transport (MOT) problems where the underlying cost has a graphical structure. These graphical multi-marginal optimal transport problems have found applications in several domains including traffic flow…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Jiaojiao Fan , Isabel Haasler , Qinsheng Zhang , Johan Karlsson , Yongxin Chen

Wasserstein barycenters define averages of probability measures in a geometrically meaningful way. Their use is increasingly popular in applied fields, such as image, geometry or language processing. In these fields however, the probability…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-03-13 Guillaume Carlier , Alex Delalande , Quentin Merigot

Computing Wasserstein barycenters (a.k.a. Optimal Transport barycenters) is a fundamental problem in geometry which has recently attracted considerable attention due to many applications in data science. While there exist polynomial-time…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Jason M. Altschuler , Enric Boix-Adsera

Optimal transport (OT) provides powerful tools for comparing probability measures in various types. The Wasserstein distance which arises naturally from the idea of OT is widely used in many machine learning applications. Unfortunately,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-03 Shu Liu , Haodong Sun , Hongyuan Zha

Entropy regularization in optimal transport (OT) has been the driver of many recent interests for Wasserstein metrics and barycenters in machine learning. It allows to keep the appealing geometrical properties of the unregularized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-05 Hicham Janati , Marco Cuturi , Alexandre Gramfort

We present a stochastic algorithm to compute the barycenter of a set of probability distributions under the Wasserstein metric from optimal transport. Unlike previous approaches, our method extends to continuous input distributions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Sebastian Claici , Edward Chien , Justin Solomon

We study the multi-marginal partial optimal transport (POT) problem between $m$ discrete (unbalanced) measures with at most $n$ supports. We first prove that we can obtain two equivalence forms of the multimarginal POT problem in terms of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-25 Khang Le , Huy Nguyen , Tung Pham , Nhat Ho

Wasserstein barycenters correspond to optimal solutions of transportation problems for several marginals, and as such have a wide range of applications ranging from economics to statistics and computer science. When the marginal probability…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-08-11 Ethan Anderes , Steffen Borgwardt , Jacob Miller

Wasserstein distance plays increasingly important roles in machine learning, stochastic programming and image processing. Major efforts have been under way to address its high computational complexity, some leading to approximate or…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-26 Yujia Xie , Xiangfeng Wang , Ruijia Wang , Hongyuan Zha

We study a general formulation of regularized Wasserstein barycenters that enjoys favorable regularity, approximation, stability and (grid-free) optimization properties. This barycenter is defined as the unique probability measure that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-28 Lénaïc Chizat

We develop an estimator-based stochastic fixed-point framework for approximately computing the 2-Wasserstein barycenter of continuous, non-parametric probability measures. Notably, we provide the first rigorous convergence analysis for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Zeyi Chen , Ariel Neufeld , Qikun Xiang

The discrete Wasserstein barycenter problem is a minimum-cost mass transport problem for a set of probability measures with finite support. In this paper, we show that finding a barycenter of sparse support is hard, even in dimension 2 and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-09 Steffen Borgwardt , Stephan Patterson