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We study a natural Wasserstein gradient flow on manifolds of probability distributions with discrete sample spaces. We derive the Riemannian structure for the probability simplex from the dynamical formulation of the Wasserstein distance on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-19 Wuchen Li , Guido Montufar

Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Francesco Locatello , Rajiv Khanna , Joydeep Ghosh , Gunnar Rätsch

We examine the infinite-dimensional optimization problem of finding a decomposition of a probability measure into K probability sub-measures to minimize specific loss functions inspired by applications in clustering and user grouping. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Jiangze Han , Christopher Thomas Ryan , Xin T. Tong

We introduce the observable Wasserstein distance, a framework for deriving lower bounds on the Wasserstein distance between probability measures on Polish metric spaces, designed to bypass the computational intractability of exact optimal…

Metric Geometry · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Edivaldo Lopes dos Santos , Leandro Vicente Mauri , Washington Mio , Tom Needham

We consider a class of time-homogeneous diffusion processes on $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ with common invariant measure but varying volatility matrices. In Euclidean space, we show via stochastic control of the diffusion coefficient that the…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Bertram Tschiderer

While stochastic variational inference is relatively well known for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models, related methods also offer ways to circumnavigate the approximation of analytically intractable expectations. The key…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-09-08 David A. Knowles

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

A simple model to handle the flow of people in emergency evacuation situations is considered: at every point x, the velocity U(x) that individuals at x would like to realize is given. Yet, the incompressibility constraint prevents this…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2010-02-04 Bertrand Maury , Aude Roudneff-Chupin , Filippo Santambrogio

We present a novel multiscale framework for analyzing sequences of probability measures in Wasserstein spaces over Euclidean domains. Exploiting the intrinsic geometry of optimal transport, we construct a multiscale transform applicable to…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-13 Wael Mattar , Nir Sharon

Gaussian mixture models form a flexible and expressive parametric family of distributions that has found applications in a wide variety of applications. Unfortunately, fitting these models to data is a notoriously hard problem from a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-05 Yuling Yan , Kaizheng Wang , Philippe Rigollet

We describe a variational approximation method for efficient inference in large-scale probabilistic models. Variational methods are deterministic procedures that provide approximations to marginal and conditional probabilities of interest.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-05-30 T. S. Jaakkola , M. I. Jordan

Variational inference in Bayesian deep learning often involves computing the gradient of an expectation that lacks a closed-form solution. In these cases, pathwise and score-function gradient estimators are the most common approaches. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-10 Kenyon Ng , Susan Wei

We provide new convergence guarantees in Wasserstein distance for diffusion-based generative models, covering both stochastic (DDPM-like) and deterministic (DDIM-like) sampling methods. We introduce a simple framework to analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Eliot Beyler , Francis Bach

We study estimation problems in safety-critical applications with streaming data. Since estimation problems can be posed as optimization problems in the probability space, we devise a stochastic projected Wasserstein gradient flow that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-07 Nicolas Lanzetti , Efe C. Balta , Dominic Liao-McPherson , Florian Dörfler

Efficiently aggregating data from different sources is a challenging problem, particularly when samples from each source are distributed differently. These differences can be inherent to the inference task or present for other reasons:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-15 Matthew Staib , Sebastian Claici , Justin Solomon , Stefanie Jegelka

This paper uses sample data to study the problem of comparing populations on finite-dimensional parallelizable Riemannian manifolds and more general trivial vector bundles. Utilizing triviality, our framework represents populations as…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-29 Michael Wilson , Tom Needham , Chiwoo Park , Suprateek Kundu , Anuj Srivastava

Variational inference is a powerful tool for approximate inference, and it has been recently applied for representation learning with deep generative models. We develop the variational Gaussian process (VGP), a Bayesian nonparametric…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-04-19 Dustin Tran , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Farzaneh Mahdisoltani

Despite of its importance for safe machine learning, uncertainty quantification for neural networks is far from being solved. State-of-the-art approaches to estimate neural uncertainties are often hybrid, combining parametric models with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Joachim Sicking , Maram Akila , Maximilian Pintz , Tim Wirtz , Asja Fischer , Stefan Wrobel

In this work, we look at Score-based generative models (also called diffusion generative models) from a geometric perspective. From a new view point, we prove that both the forward and backward process of adding noise and generating from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Sandesh Ghimire , Jinyang Liu , Armand Comas , Davin Hill , Aria Masoomi , Octavia Camps , Jennifer Dy