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Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization offers a framework for model fitting in machine learning under potential shifts in the data distribution. We study a regularized variant of this problem in which entropic smoothing produces a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Tam Le

Let $M$ be a complete connected Riemannian manifold. For $n \geq 0$, we endow the Wasserstein space $P^{(n)}_2(M) = P_2(\ldots P_2(M)\ldots)$, equipped with the Wasserstein distance $W_2$, with a variational structure that generalizes the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-04 Christophe Vauthier

Solving Fredholm equations of the first kind is crucial in many areas of the applied sciences. In this work we adopt a probabilistic and variational point of view by considering a minimization problem in the space of probability measures…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-17 Francesca R. Crucinio , Valentin De Bortoli , Arnaud Doucet , Adam M. Johansen

We develop and analyze a projected particle Langevin optimization method to learn the distribution in the Sch\"{o}nberg integral representation of the radial basis functions from training samples. More specifically, we characterize a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-06 Masoud Badiei Khuzani , Yinyu Ye , Sandy Napel , Lei Xing

Motivated by approximation Bayesian computation using mean-field variational approximation and the computation of equilibrium in multi-species systems with cross-interaction, this paper investigates the composite geodesically convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-18 Rentian Yao , Xiaohui Chen , Yun Yang

We study the problem of minimizing the Wasserstein distance between a probability distribution and an algebraic variety. We consider the setting of finite state spaces and describe the solution depending on the choice of the ground metric…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-15 T. Ö. Çelik , A. Jamneshan , G. Montúfar , B. Sturmfels , L. Venturello

The mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) minimizes an entropy-regularized nonlinear convex functional on the Wasserstein space over $\mathbb{R}^d$, and has gained attention recently as a model for the gradient descent dynamics of interacting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Anming Gu , Juno Kim

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 propose a novel approach to the problem of multilevel clustering, which aims to simultaneously partition data in each group and discover grouping patterns among groups in a potentially large hierarchically structured corpus of data. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-26 Viet Huynh , Nhat Ho , Nhan Dam , XuanLong Nguyen , Mikhail Yurochkin , Hung Bui , and Dinh Phung

Assume that we observe i.i.d.~points lying close to some unknown $d$-dimensional $\mathcal{C}^k$ submanifold $M$ in a possibly high-dimensional space. We study the problem of reconstructing the probability distribution generating the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Vincent Divol

This paper focuses on the Wasserstein distributionally robust mean-lower semi-absolute deviation (DR-MLSAD) model, where the ambiguity set is a Wasserstein ball centered on the empirical distribution of the training sample. This model can…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-04 Weimi Zhou , Yong-Jin Liu

Optimal transport is a foundational problem in optimization, that allows to compare probability distributions while taking into account geometric aspects. Its optimal objective value, the Wasserstein distance, provides an important loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-21 Marin Ballu , Quentin Berthet , Francis Bach

Modeling observations as random distributions embedded within Wasserstein spaces is becoming increasingly popular across scientific fields, as it captures the variability and geometric structure of the data more effectively. However, the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-08 François Bachoc , Alberto González-Sanz , Jean-Michel Loubes , Yisha Yao

We consider the problem of sampling from a probability distribution $\pi$. It is well known that this can be written as an optimisation problem over the space of probability distribution in which we aim to minimise the Kullback--Leibler…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-11 Francesca R. Crucinio , Sahani Pathiraja

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

We analyze an algorithm to numerically solve the mean-field optimal control problems by approximating the optimal feedback controls using neural networks with problem specific architectures. We approximate the model by an $N$-particle…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-25 H. Mete Soner , Josef Teichmann , Qinxin Yan

In Bayesian inference, the posterior distributions are difficult to obtain analytically for complex models such as neural networks. Variational inference usually uses a parametric distribution for approximation, from which we can easily…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-01 Futoshi Futami , Zhenghang Cui , Issei Sato , Masashi Sugiyama

We consider the optimization problem of minimizing an objective functional, which admits a variational form and is defined over probability distributions on the constrained domain, which poses challenges to both theoretical analysis and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-11 Dai Hai Nguyen , Tetsuya Sakurai

In this paper we propose and analyze a novel multilevel version of Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). SVGD is a recent particle based variational inference method. For Bayesian inverse problems with computationally expensive…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-02-05 Simon Weissmann , Jakob Zech

Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu