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Related papers: Sliced Wasserstein Variational Inference

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Wasserstein distance, which measures the discrepancy between distributions, shows efficacy in various types of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) applications. One of the challenges in estimating Wasserstein distance…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-27 Makoto Yamada , Yuki Takezawa , Ryoma Sato , Han Bao , Zornitsa Kozareva , Sujith Ravi

Modelling bounded rational decision-making through information constrained processing provides a principled approach for representing departures from rationality within a reinforcement learning framework, while still treating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Benjamin Patrick Evans , Leo Ardon , Sumitra Ganesh

The squared Wasserstein distance is a natural quantity to compare probability distributions in a non-parametric setting. This quantity is usually estimated with the plug-in estimator, defined via a discrete optimal transport problem which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-30 Lenaic Chizat , Pierre Roussillon , Flavien Léger , François-Xavier Vialard , Gabriel Peyré

Comparing probability measures modulo unknown rigid transformations is a central challenge in geometric data analysis. Classical optimal transport (OT) distances, including Wasserstein and sliced Wasserstein, are sensitive to rotations and…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Zakk Heile , Peilin He , Jayson Tran , Alice Wang , Shrikant Chand

We study the problem of nonparametric two-sample testing using the sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance. While prior theoretical and empirical work indicates that the SW distance offers a promising balance between strong statistical guarantees…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-03 Binh Thuan Tran , Nicolas Schreuder

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between random variables is a fundamental problem in statistical analysis. For continuous random variables, traditional information-theoretic estimators scale poorly with dimension and/or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Mikil Foss , Andrew Lamperski

Wasserstein Barycenter (WB) is one of the most fundamental optimization problems in optimal transportation. Given a set of distributions, the goal of WB is to find a new distribution that minimizes the average Wasserstein distance to them.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Qingyuan Yang , Hu Ding

In the context of kernel methods, the similarity between data points is encoded by the kernel function which is often defined thanks to the Euclidean distance, a common example being the squared exponential kernel. Recently, other distances…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-06 Henri De Plaen , Michaël Fanuel , Johan A. K. Suykens

Sliced optimal transport (SOT), or sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance, is widely recognized for its statistical and computational scalability. In this work, we further enhance computational scalability by proposing the first method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Khai Nguyen

The practical applications of Wasserstein distances (WDs) are constrained by their sample and computational complexities. Sliced-Wasserstein distances (SWDs) provide a workaround by projecting distributions onto one-dimensional subspaces,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Huy Tran , Yikun Bai , Ashkan Shahbazi , John R. Hershey , Soheil Kolouri

Bayesian inference for doubly intractable distributions is challenging because they include intractable terms, which are functions of parameters of interest. Although several alternatives have been developed for such models, they are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-08 Heesang Lee , Songhee Kim , Bokgyeong Kang , Jaewoo Park

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is not a proper distance metric and does not satisfy the triangle inequality, posing theoretical challenges in certain practical applications. Existing work has demonstrated that KL divergence between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Shiji Xiao , Yufeng Zhang , Chubo Liu , Yan Ding , Keqin Li , Kenli Li

The Boltzmann machine provides a useful framework to learn highly complex, multimodal and multiscale data distributions that occur in the real world. The default method to learn its parameters consists of minimizing the Kullback-Leibler…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-07-09 Grégoire Montavon , Klaus-Robert Müller , Marco Cuturi

The Wasserstein distance is a discrepancy measure between probability distributions, defined by an optimal transport problem. It has been used for various tasks such as retrieving similar items in high-dimensional images or text data. In…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Kanata Teshigawara , Keisho Oh , Ken Kobayashi , Kazuhide Nakata

The $2$-Wasserstein distance is sensitive to minor geometric differences between distributions, making it a very powerful dissimilarity metric. However, due to this sensitivity, a small outlier mass can also cause a significant increase in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Sharath Raghvendra , Pouyan Shirzadian , Kaiyi Zhang

The forward Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a ubiquitous objective for fitting a parameterized distribution to samples due to its tractability and equivalence to maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Its inherent asymmetry, however, may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Omri Ben-Dov , Luiz F. O. Chamon

Optimal transport is widely used to learn distributions, enforce distributional constraints, and model uncertainty. In applications, transport losses are often computed from samples through tractable representations, such as one-dimensional…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Tam Le

Slicing distribution selection has been used as an effective technique to improve the performance of parameter estimators based on minimizing sliced Wasserstein distance in applications. Previous works either utilize expensive optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-10 Khai Nguyen , Shujian Zhang , Tam Le , Nhat Ho

We introduce a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that is designed to sample from target distributions with irregular geometry using an adaptive scheme. In cases where targets exhibit non-Gaussian behaviour, we propose that adaption…

Computation · Statistics 2023-10-06 Ameer Dharamshi , Vivian Ngo , Jeffrey S. Rosenthal

We consider the problem of sampling from a probability distribution $\pi$. It is well known that this can be written as an optimisation problem over the space of probability distribution in which we aim to minimise the Kullback--Leibler…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-11 Francesca R. Crucinio , Sahani Pathiraja