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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

This paper provides a simple procedure to fit generative networks to target distributions, with the goal of a small Wasserstein distance (or other optimal transport costs). The approach is based on two principles: (a) if the source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Yucheng Chen , Matus Telgarsky , Chao Zhang , Bolton Bailey , Daniel Hsu , Jian Peng

Flow Matching has recently gained attention in generative modeling as a simple and flexible alternative to diffusion models. While existing statistical guarantees adapt tools from the analysis of diffusion models, we take a different…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Lea Kunkel , Mathias Trabs

We address the optimization problem of simultaneously minimizing multiple objective functionals over a family of probability distributions. This type of Multi-Objective Distributional Optimization commonly arises in machine learning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Dai Hai Nguyen , Hiroshi Mamitsuka , Atsuyoshi Nakamura

We propose a gradient flow procedure for generative modeling by transporting particles from an initial source distribution to a target distribution, where the gradient field on the particles is given by a noise-adaptive Wasserstein Gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Alexandre Galashov , Valentin de Bortoli , Arthur Gretton

Score matching provides an effective approach to learning flexible unnormalized models, but its scalability is limited by the need to evaluate a second-order derivative. In this paper, we present a scalable approximation to a general family…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-19 Ziyu Wang , Shuyu Cheng , Yueru Li , Jun Zhu , Bo Zhang

Sampling from high-dimensional distributions is a fundamental problem in statistical research and practice. However, great challenges emerge when the target density function is unnormalized and contains isolated modes. We tackle this…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-11 Yixuan Qiu , Xiao Wang

Variational inference (VI) can be cast as an optimization problem in which the variational parameters are tuned to closely align a variational distribution with the true posterior. The optimization task can be approached through vanilla…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Dai Hai Nguyen , Tetsuya Sakurai , Hiroshi Mamitsuka

We consider the optimization problem of minimizing a functional defined over a family of probability distributions, where the objective functional is assumed to possess a variational form. Such a distributional optimization problem arises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Zhuoran Yang , Yufeng Zhang , Yongxin Chen , Zhaoran Wang

Diffusion models are commonly interpreted as learning the score function, i.e., the gradient of the log-density of noisy data. However, this assumption implies that the target of learning is a conservative vector field, which is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 An B. Vuong , Michael T. McCann , Javier E. Santos , Yen Ting Lin

We present a novel approximate inference method for diffusion processes, based on the Wasserstein gradient flow formulation of the diffusion. In this formulation, the time-dependent density of the diffusion is derived as the limit of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-13 Charlie Frogner , Tomaso Poggio

Existing approaches to depth or disparity estimation output a distribution over a set of pre-defined discrete values. This leads to inaccurate results when the true depth or disparity does not match any of these values. The fact that this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Divyansh Garg , Yan Wang , Bharath Hariharan , Mark Campbell , Kilian Q. Weinberger , Wei-Lun Chao

In this paper, we propose a novel numerical scheme to optimize the gradient flows for learning energy-based models (EBMs). From a perspective of physical simulation, we redefine the problem of approximating the gradient flow utilizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Yang Wu , Pengxu Wei , Liang Lin

We study nonparametric density estimation problems where error is measured in the Wasserstein distance, a metric on probability distributions popular in many areas of statistics and machine learning. We give the first minimax-optimal rates…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-04-30 Jonathan Niles-Weed , Quentin Berthet

This manuscript introduces a regression-type formulation for approximating the Perron-Frobenius Operator by relying on distributional snapshots of data. These snapshots may represent densities of particles. The Wasserstein metric is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-03 Amirhossein Karimi , Tryphon T. Georgiou

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

Uncertainty propagation and filtering can be interpreted as gradient flows with respect to suitable metrics in the infinite dimensional manifold of probability density functions. Such a viewpoint has been put forth in recent literature, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-10-31 Abhishek Halder , Tryphon T. Georgiou

We study the convergence of gradient flow for the training of deep neural networks. If Residual Neural Networks are a popular example of very deep architectures, their training constitutes a challenging optimization problem due notably to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Raphaël Barboni , Gabriel Peyré , François-Xavier Vialard

The conventional understanding of adversarial training in generative adversarial networks (GANs) is that the discriminator is trained to estimate a divergence, and the generator learns to minimize this divergence. We argue that despite the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-09 Mingxuan Yi , Zhanxing Zhu , Song Liu

We develop a rigorous and general framework for constructing information-theoretic divergences that subsume both $f$-divergences and integral probability metrics (IPMs), such as the $1$-Wasserstein distance. We prove under which assumptions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-16 Jeremiah Birrell , Paul Dupuis , Markos A. Katsoulakis , Yannis Pantazis , Luc Rey-Bellet