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We present a method to efficiently compute Wasserstein gradient flows. Our approach is based on a generalization of the back-and-forth method (BFM) introduced by Jacobs and L\'eger to solve optimal transport problems. We evolve the gradient…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-11-17 Matt Jacobs , Wonjun Lee , Flavien Léger

Graph generation has emerged as a critical task in fields ranging from drug discovery to circuit design. Contemporary approaches, notably diffusion and flow-based models, have achieved solid graph generative performance through constructing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Keyue Jiang , Jiahao Cui , Xiaowen Dong , Laura Toni

We derive and present explicit algorithms to facilitate streamlined computing for variational inference for models containing higher level random effects. Existing literature, such as Lee and Wand (2016), is such that streamlined…

Computation · Statistics 2020-07-07 Tui H. Nolan , Marianne Menictas , Matt P. Wand

The Mean Field Variational Bayes (MFVB) method is one of the most computationally efficient techniques for Bayesian inference. However, its use has been restricted to models with conjugate priors or those that require analytical…

Computation · Statistics 2023-05-18 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Paco Tseng , Robert Kohn

Diffusion processes are a class of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) providing a rich family of expressive models that arise naturally in dynamic modelling tasks. Probabilistic inference and learning under generative models with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Prakhar Verma , Vincent Adam , Arno Solin

The computation of Wasserstein gradient direction is essential for posterior sampling problems and scientific computing. The approximation of the Wasserstein gradient with finite samples requires solving a variational problem. We study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Yifei Wang , Peng Chen , Mert Pilanci , Wuchen Li

The Wasserstein distance received a lot of attention recently in the community of machine learning, especially for its principled way of comparing distributions. It has found numerous applications in several hard problems, such as domain…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-23 Nicolas Courty , Rémi Flamary , Mélanie Ducoffe

We study the particle method to approximate the gradient flow on the $L^p$-Wasserstein space. This method relies on the discretization of the energy introduced by [3] via nonoverlapping balls centered at the particles and preserves the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-01-08 Rong Lei

Statistical models are an essential tool to model, forecast and understand the hydrological processes in watersheds. In particular, the understanding of time lags associated with the delay between rainfall occurrence and subsequent changes…

In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $\pi$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Luca Ghafourpour , Sinho Chewi , Alessio Figalli , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

Motivated by variational inference methods, we propose a zeroth-order algorithm for solving optimization problems in the space of Gaussian probability measures. The algorithm is based on an interacting system of Gaussian particles that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Giacomo Borghi , José A. Carrillo

We study the quantitative convergence of drift-diffusion PDEs that arise as Wasserstein gradient flows of linearly convex functions over the space of probability measures on ${\mathbb R}^d$. In this setting, the objective is in general not…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-17 Lénaïc Chizat , Maria Colombo , Xavier Fernández-Real

Recent work has established a path-gradient estimator for simple variational Gaussian distributions and has argued that the path-gradient is particularly beneficial in the regime in which the variational distribution approaches the exact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Lorenz Vaitl , Kim A. Nicoli , Shinichi Nakajima , Pan Kessel

Distribution data refers to a data set where each sample is represented as a probability distribution, a subject area receiving burgeoning interest in the field of statistics. Although several studies have developed…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-09 Ryo Okano , Masaaki Imaizumi

Distributed inference/estimation in Bayesian framework in the context of sensor networks has recently received much attention due to its broad applicability. The variational Bayesian (VB) algorithm is a technique for approximating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-30 Junhao Hua , Chunguang Li

We show that the continuous-time gradient descent in Rn can be viewed as an optimal controlled evolution for a suitable action functional; a similar result holds for stochastic gradient descent. We then provide an analogous characterization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-03 Yongxin Chen , Tryphon Georgiou , Michele Pavon

A crucial task in predictive maintenance is estimating the remaining useful life of physical systems. In the last decade, deep learning has improved considerably upon traditional model-based and statistical approaches in terms of predictive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Luca Della Libera , Jacopo Andreoli , Davide Dalle Pezze , Mirco Ravanelli , Gian Antonio Susto

The purpose of this paper is to answer a few open questions in the interface of kernel methods and PDE gradient flows. Motivated by recent advances in machine learning, particularly in generative modeling and sampling, we present a rigorous…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-29 Jia-Jie Zhu , Alexander Mielke

We introduce a modified Benamou-Brenier type approach leading to a Wasserstein type distance that allows global invariance, specifically, isometries, and we show that the problem can be summarized to orthogonal transformations. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-24 Kevine Meugang Toukam

Diffusion and flow-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in domains such as image synthesis, video generation, and natural language modeling. In this work, we extend these advances to weight space learning by leveraging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Daniel Saragih , Deyu Cao , Tejas Balaji