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The Straight-Through (ST) estimator is a widely used technique for back-propagating gradients through discrete random variables. However, this effective method lacks theoretical justification. In this paper, we show that ST can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-08 Pengyu Cheng , Chang Liu , Chunyuan Li , Dinghan Shen , Ricardo Henao , Lawrence Carin

We study the problem of estimating a sequence of evolving probability distributions from historical data, where the underlying distribution changes over time in a nonstationary and nonparametric manner. To capture gradual changes, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-16 Edward J. Anderson , Dominic S. T. Keehan

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

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

It is well-known that many diffusion equations can be recast as Wasserstein gradient flows. Moreover, in recent years, by modifying the Wasserstein distance appropriately, this technique has been transferred to further evolution equations…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-10-15 Kaveh Bashiri , Anton Bovier

This is an expository paper on the theory of gradient flows, and in particular of those PDEs which can be interpreted as gradient flows for the Wasserstein metric on the space of probability measures (a distance induced by optimal…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2016-09-14 Filippo Santambrogio

We study the Wasserstein gradient flow of the Sinkhorn divergence when both the source and the target are Gaussian distributions. We prove the existence of a flow that stays in the class of Gaussian distributions, and is unique in the…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-02-20 Mathis Hardion , Théo Lacombe

Gaussian Process regression is a kernel method successfully adopted in many real-life applications. Recently, there is a growing interest on extending this method to non-Euclidean input spaces, like the one considered in this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-05 Antonio Candelieri , Andrea Ponti , Francesco Archetti

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

Diffusion models and flow-based methods have shown impressive generative capability, especially for images, but their sampling is expensive because it requires many iterative updates. We introduce W-Flow, a framework for training a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiaqi Han , Puheng Li , Qiushan Guo , Renyuan Xu , Stefano Ermon , Emmanuel J. Candès

Bayesian inference plays an important role in advancing machine learning, but faces computational challenges when applied to complex models such as deep neural networks. Variational inference circumvents these challenges by formulating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-03 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Didrik Nielsen

The $E$-optimality criterion for a regression model maximizes the smallest eigenvalue of the information matrix and becomes non-differentiable when this eigenvalue has multiplicity greater than one. Working in the $2$-Wasserstein space, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Jieling Shi , Kim-Chuan Toh , Xin T. Tong , Weng Kee Wong

We construct a Wasserstein gradient flow of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and study its convergence properties. The MMD is an integral probability metric defined for a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), and serves as a metric on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-04 Michael Arbel , Anna Korba , Adil Salim , Arthur Gretton

We propose a projected Wasserstein gradient descent method (pWGD) for high-dimensional Bayesian inference problems. The underlying density function of a particle system of WGD is approximated by kernel density estimation (KDE), which faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yifei Wang , Peng Chen , Wuchen Li

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

A nonlinear diffusion equation, interpreted as a Wasserstein gradient flow, is numerically solved in one space dimension using a higher-order minimizing movement scheme based on the BDF (backward differentiation formula) discretization. In…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-09-02 Bertram Düring , Philipp Fuchs , Ansgar Jüngel

Flow Matching, a promising approach in generative modeling, has recently gained popularity. Relying on ordinary differential equations, it offers a simple and flexible alternative to diffusion models, which are currently the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-13 Lea Kunkel

We develop a fast and scalable numerical approach to solve Wasserstein gradient flows (WGFs), particularly suitable for high-dimensional cases. Our approach is to use general reduced-order models, like deep neural networks, to parameterize…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-05-24 Yijie Jin , Shu Liu , Hao Wu , Xiaojing Ye , Haomin Zhou

We reveal a precise mathematical framework about a new family of generative models which we call Gradient Flow Drifting. With this framework, we prove an equivalence between the recently proposed Drifting Model and the Wasserstein gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Jiarui Cao , Zixuan Wei , Yuxin Liu

The aim of this paper is twofold. Based on the geometric Wasserstein tangent space, we first introduce Wasserstein steepest descent flows. These are locally absolutely continuous curves in the Wasserstein space whose tangent vectors point…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-06 Johannes Hertrich , Manuel Gräf , Robert Beinert , Gabriele Steidl