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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

Wasserstein gradient flows are continuous time dynamics that define curves of steepest descent to minimize an objective function over the space of probability measures (i.e., the Wasserstein space). This objective is typically a divergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-23 Adil Salim , Anna Korba , Giulia Luise

Wasserstein gradient and Hamiltonian flows have emerged as essential tools for modeling complex dynamics in the natural sciences, with applications ranging from partial differential equations (PDEs) and optimal transport to quantum…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Jianyu Hu , Juan-Pablo Ortega , Daiying Yin

We present a framework for Nesterov's accelerated gradient flows in probability space to design efficient mean-field Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for Bayesian inverse problems. Here four examples of information metrics are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-27 Yifei Wang , Wuchen Li

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

Wasserstein Gradient Flows (WGF) with respect to specific functionals have been widely used in the machine learning literature. Recently, neural networks have been adopted to approximate certain intractable parts of the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Huminhao Zhu , Fangyikang Wang , Chao Zhang , Hanbin Zhao , Hui Qian

Recently, Deng et al. (2026) proposed Generative Modeling via Drifting (GMD), a novel framework for generative tasks. This note presents an analysis of GMD through the lens of Wasserstein Gradient Flows (WGF), i.e., the path of steepest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Arthur Gretton , Li Kevin Wenliang , Alexandre Galashov , James Thornton , Valentin De Bortoli , Arnaud Doucet

Optimal Transport has sparked vivid interest in recent years, in particular thanks to the Wasserstein distance, which provides a geometrically sensible and intuitive way of comparing probability measures. For computational reasons, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Eloi Tanguy

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

The maximum mean discrepancy and Wasserstein distance are popular distance measures between distributions and play important roles in many machine learning problems such as metric learning, generative modeling, domain adaption, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Dong Qiao , Jicong Fan

We propose a fully discrete variational scheme for nonlinear evolution equations with gradient flow structure on the space of finite Radon measures on an interval with respect to a generalized version of the Wasserstein distance with…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-09-29 Jonathan Zinsl , Daniel Matthes

Wasserstein gradient flows provide a powerful means of understanding and solving many diffusion equations. Specifically, Fokker-Planck equations, which model the diffusion of probability measures, can be understood as gradient descent over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Petr Mokrov , Alexander Korotin , Lingxiao Li , Aude Genevay , Justin Solomon , Evgeny Burnaev

This article details a novel numerical scheme to approximate gradient flows for optimal transport (i.e. Wasserstein) metrics. These flows have proved useful to tackle theoretically and numerically non-linear diffusion equations that model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-03-10 Gabriel Peyré

Many applications in machine learning involve data represented as probability distributions. The emergence of such data requires radically novel techniques to design tractable gradient flows on probability distributions over this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Clément Bonet , Christophe Vauthier , Anna Korba

We propose Sobolev-regularized Maximum Mean Discrepancy (SrMMD) gradient flow, a regularized variant of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) gradient flow based on a gradient penalty on the witness function. The proposed regularization mitigates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Chenyang Tian , Bharath K. Sriperumbudur , Arthur Gretton , Zonghao Chen

Comparing probability distributions is at the crux of many machine learning algorithms. Maximum Mean Discrepancies (MMD) and Wasserstein distances are two classes of distances between probability distributions that have attracted abundant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-01 Titouan Vayer , Rémi Gribonval

We develop novel neural network-based implicit particle methods to compute high-dimensional Wasserstein-type gradient flows with linear and nonlinear mobility functions. The main idea is to use the Lagrangian formulation in the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-11-14 Wonjun Lee , Li Wang , Wuchen Li

We prove that the sequence of marginals obtained from the iterations of the Sinkhorn algorithm or the iterative proportional fitting procedure (IPFP) on joint densities, converges to an absolutely continuous curve on the $2$-Wasserstein…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-21 Nabarun Deb , Young-Heon Kim , Soumik Pal , Geoffrey Schiebinger

Computing pairwise Wasserstein distances is a fundamental bottleneck in data analysis pipelines. Motivated by the classical Kuratowski embedding theorem, we propose two neural architectures for learning to approximate the Wasserstein-2…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Andrew Qing He

Neural Processes (NPs) are a class of models that learn a mapping from a context set of input-output pairs to a distribution over functions. They are traditionally trained using maximum likelihood with a KL divergence regularization term.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Andrew Carr , Jared Nielsen , David Wingate