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This paper introduces two variational inference approaches for infinite-dimensional inverse problems, developed through gradient descent with a constant learning rate. The proposed methods enable efficient approximate sampling from the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-05 Jiaming Sui , Junxiong Jia , Jinglai Li

We propose to align distributional data from the perspective of Wasserstein means. We raise the problem of regularizing Wasserstein means and propose several terms tailored to tackle different problems. Our formulation is based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 Liang Mi , Wen Zhang , Yalin Wang

We study the problem of the decentralized computation of entropy-regularized semi-discrete Wasserstein barycenters over a network. Building upon recent primal-dual approaches, we propose a sampling gradient quantization scheme that allows…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-28 Roman Krawtschenko , César A. Uribe , Alexander Gasnikov , Pavel Dvurechensky

Variational empirical Bayes (VEB) methods provide a practically attractive approach to fitting large, sparse, multiple regression models. These methods usually use coordinate ascent to optimize the variational objective function, an…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-25 Saikat Banerjee , Peter Carbonetto , Matthew Stephens

Variational inference is an umbrella term for algorithms which cast Bayesian inference as optimization. Classically, variational inference uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence to define the optimization. Though this divergence has been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-16 Rajesh Ranganath , Jaan Altosaar , Dustin Tran , David M. Blei

One of the most popular approaches for solving total variation-regularized optimization problems in the space of measures are Particle Gradient Flows (PGFs). These restrict the problem to linear combinations of Dirac deltas and then perform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-31 Christian Amend , Marcello Carioni , Konstantinos Zemas

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) aims to find robust and generalizable solutions by hedging against data perturbations in Wasserstein distance. Despite its recent empirical success in operations research and machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Rui Gao

We introduce a distributionally robust maximum likelihood estimation model with a Wasserstein ambiguity set to infer the inverse covariance matrix of a $p$-dimensional Gaussian random vector from $n$ independent samples. The proposed model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-21 Viet Anh Nguyen , Daniel Kuhn , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani

We study a variety of Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (WDRO) problems where the distributions in the ambiguity set are chosen by constraining their Wasserstein discrepancies to the empirical distribution. Using the notion…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-07 Hong T. M. Chu , Meixia Lin , Kim-Chuan Toh

Optimal transport distances are powerful tools to compare probability distributions and have found many applications in machine learning. Yet their algorithmic complexity prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. To overcome this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-14 Kilian Fatras , Younes Zine , Rémi Flamary , Rémi Gribonval , Nicolas Courty

Sampling a target probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental challenge in computational science and engineering. Recent work shows that algorithms derived by considering gradient flows in the space of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-12 Yifan Chen , Daniel Zhengyu Huang , Jiaoyang Huang , Sebastian Reich , Andrew M Stuart

Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Hoang Phuc Hau Luu , Hanlin Yu , Bernardo Williams , Marcelo Hartmann , Arto Klami

Many numerical and learning algorithms rely on the solution of the Monge-Kantorovich problem and Wasserstein distances, which provide appropriate distributional metrics. While the natural approach is to treat the problem as an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-11 Mohsen Sadr , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Hossein Gorji

Many studies have been conducted on flows of probability measures, often in terms of gradient flows. We utilize a generalized notion of derivatives with respect to time to model the instantaneous evolution of empirically observed…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-16 Yaqing Chen , Hans-Georg Müller

This paper contains two contributions in the study of optimal transport on metric graphs. Firstly, we prove a Benamou-Brenier formula for the Wasserstein distance, which establishes the equivalence of static and dynamical optimal transport.…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2022-05-02 Matthias Erbar , Dominik Forkert , Jan Maas , Delio Mugnolo

In this work, we propose a numerical method to compute the Wasserstein Hamiltonian flow (WHF), which is a Hamiltonian system on the probability density manifold. Many well-known PDE systems can be reformulated as WHFs. We use parameterized…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-07-18 Hao Wu , Shu Liu , Xiaojing Ye , Haomin Zhou

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-03 Soumyadip Ghosh , Mark Squillante , Ebisa Wollega

This paper considers parameter estimation for nonlinear state-space models, which is an important but challenging problem. We address this challenge by employing a variational inference (VI) approach, which is a principled method that has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-15 Jarrad Courts , Adrian Wills , Thomas Schön , Brett Ninness

The natural gradient method is widely used in statistical optimization, but its standard formulation assumes a Euclidean parameter space. This paper proposes an inversion-free stochastic natural gradient method for probability distributions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Dario Draca , Takuo Matsubara , Minh-Ngoc Tran

Variational Bayes (VB) has become a widely-used tool for Bayesian inference in statistics and machine learning. Nonetheless, the development of the existing VB algorithms is so far generally restricted to the case where the variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Dang H. Nguyen , Duy Nguyen