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Unbalanced optimal transport (UOT) extends optimal transport (OT) to take into account mass variations to compare distributions. This is crucial to make OT successful in ML applications, making it robust to data normalization and outliers.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-04 Thibault Séjourné , François-Xavier Vialard , Gabriel Peyré

Optimal transport has emerged as a fundamental methodology with applications spanning multiple research areas in recent years. However, the convergence rate of the empirical estimator to its population counterpart suffers from the curse of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Jiaping Yang , Yunxin Zhang

We consider the nonlinear Kalman filtering problem using Kullback-Leibler (KL) and $\alpha$-divergence measures as optimization criteria. Unlike linear Kalman filters, nonlinear Kalman filters do not have closed form Gaussian posteriors…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-22 San Gultekin , John Paisley

Inverse optimal transport (OT) refers to the problem of learning the cost function for OT from observed transport plan or its samples. In this paper, we derive an unconstrained convex optimization formulation of the inverse OT problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Shaojun Ma , Haodong Sun , Xiaojing Ye , Hongyuan Zha , Haomin Zhou

An optimal transport (OT) problem seeks to find the cheapest mapping between two distributions with equal total density, given the cost of transporting density from one place to another. Unbalanced OT allows for different total density in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-28 Jacob J. M. Francis , Colin J. Cotter , Marion P. Mittermaier

The modeling of phenomenological structure is a crucial aspect in inverse imaging problems. One emerging modeling tool in computational imaging is the optimal transport framework. Its ability to model geometric displacements across an…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-12 John Lee , Nicholas P. Bertrand , Christopher J. Rozell

Optimal transport (OT) finds a least cost transport plan between two probability distributions using a cost matrix defined on pairs of points. Unlike standard OT, which infers unstructured pointwise mappings, low-rank optimal transport…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Henri Schmidt , Peter Halmos , Ben Raphael

We establish numerical methods for solving the martingale optimal transport problem (MOT) - a version of the classical optimal transport with an additional martingale constraint on transport's dynamics. We prove that the MOT value can be…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-04-08 Gaoyue Guo , Jan Obloj

We develop a mathematical theory of entropic regularisation of unbalanced optimal transport problems. Focusing on static formulation and relying on the formalism developed for the unregularised case, we show that unbalanced optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-05 Maciej Buze , Manh Hong Duong

Comparing probability distributions is a fundamental problem in data sciences. Simple norms and divergences such as the total variation and the relative entropy only compare densities in a point-wise manner and fail to capture the geometric…

Optimal transport (OT) theory has been been used in machine learning to study and characterize maps that can push-forward efficiently a probability measure onto another. Recent works have drawn inspiration from Brenier's theorem, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Théo Uscidda , Marco Cuturi

We discuss a relation between the Kantorovich-Wasserstein (KW) metric and the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. The former is defined using the optimal transport problem (OTP) in the Kantorovich formulation. The latter is used to define…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Roman V. Belavkin

We develop a novel theoretical framework for understating OT schemes respecting a class structure. For this purpose, we propose a convex OT program with a sum-of-norms regularization term, which provably recovers the underlying class…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Arman Rahbar , Ashkan Panahi , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani , Devdatt Dubhashi , Hamid Krim

Estimating optimal transport (OT) maps (a.k.a. Monge maps) between two measures $P$ and $Q$ is a problem fraught with computational and statistical challenges. A promising approach lies in using the dual potential functions obtained when…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-20 Aram-Alexandre Pooladian , Marco Cuturi , Jonathan Niles-Weed

This paper develops a unified perspective on several optimal control formulations through the lens of Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization. We propose a central problem that separates the KL penalties on policies and transitions with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-14 Ajinkya Bhole , Mohammad Mahmoudi Filabadi , Guillaume Crevecoeur , Tom Lefebvre

Optimal transport (OT) distances are finding evermore applications in machine learning and computer vision, but their wide spread use in larger-scale problems is impeded by their high computational cost. In this work we develop a family of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-06 Brahim Khalil Abid , Robert M. Gower

In many applications of optimal transport (OT), the object of primary interest is the optimal transport map. This map rearranges mass from one probability distribution to another in the most efficient way possible by minimizing a specified…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-25 Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Tudor Manole , Larry Wasserman

Optimal Transport, a theory for optimal allocation of resources, is widely used in various fields such as astrophysics, machine learning, and imaging science. However, many applications impose elementwise constraints on the transport plan…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-28 Zixuan Cang , Qing Nie , Yanxiang Zhao

One possibility of defining a quantum R\'enyi $\alpha$-divergence of two quantum states is to optimize the classical R\'enyi $\alpha$-divergence of their post-measurement probability distributions over all possible measurements (measured…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-01-18 Milán Mosonyi , Fumio Hiai

Optimal transport (OT) formalizes the problem of finding an optimal coupling between probability measures given a cost matrix. The inverse problem of inferring the cost given a coupling is Inverse Optimal Transport (IOT). IOT is less well…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-22 Wei-Ting Chiu , Pei Wang , Patrick Shafto