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Related papers: Normalizing flows as approximations of optimal tra…

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Optimal transport (OT) provides effective tools for comparing and mapping probability measures. We propose to leverage the flexibility of neural networks to learn an approximate optimal transport map. More precisely, we present a new and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-06 Florentin Coeurdoux , Nicolas Dobigeon , Pierre Chainais

A normalizing flow is an invertible mapping between an arbitrary probability distribution and a standard normal distribution; it can be used for density estimation and statistical inference. Computing the flow follows the change of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-10 Derek Onken , Samy Wu Fung , Xingjian Li , Lars Ruthotto

We present a flow-based approach to the optimal transport (OT) problem between two continuous distributions $\pi_0,\pi_1$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, of minimizing a transport cost $\mathbb{E}[c(X_1-X_0)]$ in the set of couplings $(X_0,X_1)$ whose…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-30 Qiang Liu

Computing optimal transport (OT) for general high-dimensional data has been a long-standing challenge. Despite much progress, most of the efforts including neural network methods have been focused on the static formulation of the OT…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Chen Xu , Xiuyuan Cheng , Yao Xie

This paper investigates the connections between rectified flows, flow matching, and optimal transport. Flow matching is a recent approach to learning generative models by estimating velocity fields that guide transformations from a source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Johannes Hertrich , Antonin Chambolle , Julie Delon

Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) construct invertible mappings between an arbitrary complex distribution and an isotropic Gaussian distribution using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (neural ODEs). It has not been tractable on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Shian Du , Yihong Luo , Wei Chen , Jian Xu , Delu Zeng

We derive a Maximum Principle for optimal control problems with constraints given by the coupling of a system of ODEs and a PDE of Vlasov-type. Such problems arise naturally as ${\Gamma}$-limits of optimal control problems subject to ODE…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-04-10 Mattia Bongini , Massimo Fornasier , Francesco Rossi , Francesco Solombrino

Following [21, 23], the present work investigates a new relative entropy-regularized algorithm for solving the optimal transport on a graph problem within the randomized shortest paths formalism. More precisely, a unit flow is injected into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Sylvain Courtain , Guillaume Guex , Ilkka Kivimaki , Marco Saerens

This paper presents a novel two-step approach for the fundamental problem of learning an optimal map from one distribution to another. First, we learn an optimal transport (OT) plan, which can be thought as a one-to-many map between the two…

We study the fundamental computational problem of approximating optimal transport (OT) equations using neural differential equations (Neural ODEs). More specifically, we develop a novel framework for approximating unbalanced optimal…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-21 Minh-Nhat Phung , Minh-Binh Tran

Optimal transport (OT) theory provides a principled framework for modeling mass movement in applications such as mobility, logistics, and economics. Classical formulations, however, generally ignore capacity limits that are intrinsic in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-04 Anqi Dong , Karl Henrik Johansson , Johan Karlsson

We address the convergence problem in learning the Optimal Transport (OT) map, where the OT Map refers to a map from one distribution to another while minimizing the transport cost. Semi-dual Neural OT, a widely used approach for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jaemoo Choi , Jaewoong Choi , Dohyun Kwon

We study an approximate controllability problem for the continuity equation and its application to constructing transport maps with normalizing flows. Specifically, we construct time-dependent controls $\theta=(w, a, b)$ in the vector field…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-19 Antonio Álvarez-López , Borjan Geshkovski , Domènec Ruiz-Balet

Flow-based methods for sampling and generative modeling use continuous-time dynamical systems to represent a {transport map} that pushes forward a source measure to a target measure. The introduction of a time axis provides considerable…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-19 Panos Tsimpos , Zhi Ren , Jakob Zech , Youssef Marzouk

We analyze a novel class of rough stochastic control problems that allows for a convenient approach to solving pathwise stochastic control problems with both non-anticipative and anticipative controls. We first establish the well-posedness…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-19 Ulrich Horst , Huilin Zhang

In this note, we revisit the problem of flow approximation properties of neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs). The approximation properties have been considered as a flow controllability problem in recent literature. The neural…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-07 Karthik Elamvazhuthi

Optimal transportation provides a means of lifting distances between points on a geometric domain to distances between signals over the domain, expressed as probability distributions. On a graph, transportation problems can be used to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-26 Montacer Essid , Justin Solomon

Generative models based on flow matching have attracted significant attention for their simplicity and superior performance in high-resolution image synthesis. By leveraging the instantaneous change-of-variables formula, one can directly…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-06 Yasi Zhang , Peiyu Yu , Yaxuan Zhu , Yingshan Chang , Feng Gao , Ying Nian Wu , Oscar Leong

Replacing positivity constraints by an entropy barrier is popular to approximate solutions of linear programs. In the special case of the optimal transport problem, this technique dates back to the early work of Schr\"odinger. This approach…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2017-01-10 Guillaume Carlier , Vincent Duval , Gabriel Peyré , Bernhard Schmitzer

Rectified flow (Liu et al., 2022; Liu, 2022; Wu et al., 2023) is a method for defining a transport map between two distributions, and enjoys popularity in machine learning, although theoretical results supporting the validity of these…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-11 Gonzalo Mena , Arun Kumar Kuchibhotla , Larry Wasserman
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