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We develop a theory of finite-dimensional polyhedral subsets over the Wasserstein space and optimization of functionals over them via first-order methods. Our main application is to the problem of mean-field variational inference, which…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Yiheng Jiang , Sinho Chewi , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

We consider a general online stochastic optimization problem with multiple budget constraints over a horizon of finite time periods. In each time period, a reward function and multiple cost functions are revealed, and the decision maker…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Jiashuo Jiang , Xiaocheng Li , Jiawei Zhang

We provide upper bounds of the expected Wasserstein distance between a probability measure and its empirical version, generalizing recent results for finite dimensional Euclidean spaces and bounded functional spaces. Such a generalization…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-01-29 Jing Lei

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

In inverse problems, many conditional generative models approximate the posterior measure by minimizing a distance between the joint measure and its learned approximation. While this approach also controls the distance between the posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Jannis Chemseddine , Paul Hagemann , Gabriele Steidl , Christian Wald

Sliced Wasserstein distances preserve properties of classic Wasserstein distances while being more scalable for computation and estimation in high dimensions. The goal of this work is to quantify this scalability from three key aspects: (i)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Sloan Nietert , Ritwik Sadhu , Ziv Goldfeld , Kengo Kato

This paper considers the problem of regression over distributions, which is becoming increasingly important in machine learning. Existing approaches often ignore the geometry of the probability space or are computationally expensive. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Maksim Maslov , Alexander Kugaevskikh , Matthew Ivanov

We examine the infinite-dimensional optimization problem of finding a decomposition of a probability measure into K probability sub-measures to minimize specific loss functions inspired by applications in clustering and user grouping. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Jiangze Han , Christopher Thomas Ryan , Xin T. Tong

This paper discusses a class of combinatorial optimization problems with uncertain costs in the objective function. It is assumed that a sample of the cost realizations is available, which defines an empirical probability distribution for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-21 Marcel Jackiewicz , Adam Kasperski , Pawel Zielinski

We consider the problem of analyzing the probabilistic performance of first-order methods when solving convex optimization problems drawn from an unknown distribution only accessible through samples. By combining performance estimation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-11 Jisun Park , Vinit Ranjan , Bartolomeo Stellato

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

The Wasserstein distance is a distance between two probability distributions and has recently gained increasing popularity in statistics and machine learning, owing to its attractive properties. One important approach to extending this…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-14 Ryo Okano , Masaaki Imaizumi

We consider a distributionally robust second-order stochastic dominance constrained optimization problem. We require the dominance constraints hold with respect to all probability distributions in a Wasserstein ball centered at the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-20 Yu Mei , Jia Liu , Zhiping Chen

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

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization estimators are obtained as solutions of min-max problems in which the statistician selects a parameter minimizing the worst-case loss among all probability models within a certain distance…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-03-04 Jose Blanchet , Karthyek Murthy , Nian Si

In this article, we derive first-order necessary optimality conditions for a constrained optimal control problem formulated in the Wasserstein space of probability measures. To this end, we introduce a new notion of localised metric…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-28 Benoît Bonnet , Hélène Frankowska

Algorithms for bilevel optimization often encounter Hessian computations, which are prohibitive in high dimensions. While recent works offer first-order methods for unconstrained bilevel problems, the constrained setting remains relatively…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-22 Guy Kornowski , Swati Padmanabhan , Kai Wang , Zhe Zhang , Suvrit Sra

Wasserstein distances define a metric between probability measures on arbitrary metric spaces, including meta-measures (measures over measures). The resulting Wasserstein over Wasserstein (WoW) distance is a powerful, but computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Moritz Piening , Robert Beinert

We study the problem of minimizing the Wasserstein distance between a probability distribution and an algebraic variety. We consider the setting of finite state spaces and describe the solution depending on the choice of the ground metric…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-15 T. Ö. Çelik , A. Jamneshan , G. Montúfar , B. Sturmfels , L. Venturello

Optimal Transport has received much attention in Machine Learning as it allows to compare probability distributions by exploiting the geometry of the underlying space. However, in its original formulation, solving this problem suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Clément Bonet