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Particle-based variational inference offers a flexible way of approximating complex posterior distributions with a set of particles. In this paper we introduce a new particle-based variational inference method based on the theory of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-16 Luca Ambrogioni , Umut Guclu , Marcel van Gerven

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

Various machine learning tasks, from generative modeling to domain adaptation, revolve around the concept of dataset transformation and manipulation. While various methods exist for transforming unlabeled datasets, principled methods to do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 David Alvarez-Melis , Nicolò Fusi

This paper presents a groundbreaking approach to causal inference by integrating continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) with parametric submodels, enhancing their geometric sensitivity and improving upon traditional Targeted Maximum Likelihood…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Kaiwen Hou

Model Updating is frequently used in Structural Health Monitoring to determine structures' operating conditions and whether maintenance is required. Data collected by sensors are used to update the values of some initially unknown…

Computation · Statistics 2024-01-23 Felipe Igea , Alice Cicirello

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

Generative modeling typically concerns transporting a single source distribution to a target distribution via simple probability flows. However, in fields like computer graphics and single-cell genomics, samples themselves can be viewed as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Doron Haviv , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian , Dana Pe'er , Brandon Amos

We develop a framework for generalized variational inference in infinite-dimensional function spaces and use it to construct a method termed Gaussian Wasserstein inference (GWI). GWI leverages the Wasserstein distance between Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Veit D. Wild , Robert Hu , Dino Sejdinovic

Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) update the particles based on the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, the design of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-26 Ziheng Cheng , Shiyue Zhang , Longlin Yu , Cheng Zhang

Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) have gained attention in the Bayesian inference literature, for their capacity to yield flexible and accurate approximations. We explore ParVIs from the perspective of Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-17 Chang Liu , Jingwei Zhuo , Pengyu Cheng , Ruiyi Zhang , Jun Zhu , Lawrence Carin

Wasserstein gradient flows (WGFs) describe the evolution of probability distributions in Wasserstein space as steepest descent dynamics for a free energy functional. Computing the full path from an arbitrary initial distribution to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Chengyu Liu , Xiang Zhou

This paper studies the optimization of the KL functional on the Wasserstein space of probability measures, and develops a sampling framework based on Wasserstein gradient descent (WGD). We identify two important subclasses of the…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-04 Van Chien Ta , Thi Mai Hong Chu , Minh-Ngoc Tran

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

Gaussian processes (GPs) are a well-known nonparametric Bayesian inference technique, but they suffer from scalability problems for large sample sizes, and their performance can degrade for non-stationary or spatially heterogeneous data. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-28 Michael E. Kepler , Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Daniel J. Stilwell

In this paper we bring together some of the key ideas and methods of two disparate fields of mathematical research, frame theory and optimal transport, using the methods of the second to answer questions posed in the first. In particular,…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2022-12-01 Clare Wickman , Kasso Okoudjou

What is the optimal way to approximate a high-dimensional diffusion process by one in which the coordinates are independent? This paper presents a construction, called the \emph{independent projection}, which is optimal for two natural…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-10-10 Daniel Lacker

Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and its variants have been widely used for text-to-3D generation by distilling 2D image diffusion priors. However, the standard SDS objective is prone to severe mode collapse, frequently yielding…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Rohith Ramanan , A. N. Rajagopalan

Wasserstein gradient flow (WGF) is a common method to perform optimization over the space of probability measures. While WGF is guaranteed to converge to a first-order stationary point, for nonconvex functionals the converged solution does…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Naoya Yamamoto , Juno Kim , Taiji Suzuki

Gradient flow in the 2-Wasserstein space is widely used to optimize functionals over probability distributions and is typically implemented using an interacting particle system with $n$ particles. Analyzing these algorithms requires showing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Chandan Tankala , Dheeraj M. Nagaraj , Anant Raj

In this paper, we address the classification of instances each characterized not by a singular point, but by a distribution on a vector space. We employ the Wasserstein metric to measure distances between distributions, which are then used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-27 Jia Li , Lin Lin