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This paper presents a methodology and numerical algorithms for constructing accelerated gradient flows on the space of probability distributions. In particular, we extend the recent variational formulation of accelerated gradient methods in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-14 Amirhossein Taghvaei , Prashant G. Mehta

We present a computationally efficient framework, called $\texttt{FlowDRO}$, for solving flow-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems with Wasserstein uncertainty sets while aiming to find continuous worst-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Chen Xu , Jonghyeok Lee , Xiuyuan Cheng , Yao Xie

We introduce $\textit{Stein transport}$, a novel methodology for Bayesian inference designed to efficiently push an ensemble of particles along a predefined curve of tempered probability distributions. The driving vector field is chosen…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-02 Nikolas Nüsken

We propose conditional flows of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) with the negative distance kernel for posterior sampling and conditional generative modeling. This MMD, which is also known as energy distance, has several advantageous…

Gradient-flow (GF) viewpoints unify and illuminate optimization algorithms, yet most GF analyses focus on unconstrained settings. We develop a geometry-respecting framework for constrained problems by (i) reparameterizing feasible sets with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-29 Valentin Leplat

We consider a class of optimization problems on the space of probability measures motivated by the mean-field approach to studying neural networks. Such problems can be solved by constructing continuous-time gradient flows that converge to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-18 Petra Lazić , Linshan Liu , Mateusz B. Majka

Gradient flow in the 2-Wasserstein space is widely used to optimize functionals over probability distributions and is typically implemented using an interacting particle system with $n$ particles. Analyzing these algorithms requires showing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Chandan Tankala , Dheeraj M. Nagaraj , Anant Raj

This is an expository paper on the theory of gradient flows, and in particular of those PDEs which can be interpreted as gradient flows for the Wasserstein metric on the space of probability measures (a distance induced by optimal…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2016-09-14 Filippo Santambrogio

While behavior cloning with flow/diffusion policies excels at learning complex skills from demonstrations, it remains vulnerable to distributional shift, and standard RL methods struggle to fine-tune these models due to their iterative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mingyang Sun , Pengxiang Ding , Weinan Zhang , Donglin Wang

We investigate a family of gradient flows of positive and probability measures, focusing on the Hellinger-Kantorovich (HK) geometry, which unifies transport mechanism of Otto-Wasserstein, and the birth-death mechanism of Hellinger (or…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-01-29 Alexander Mielke , Jia-Jie Zhu

The aim of this paper is twofold. Based on the geometric Wasserstein tangent space, we first introduce Wasserstein steepest descent flows. These are locally absolutely continuous curves in the Wasserstein space whose tangent vectors point…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-06 Johannes Hertrich , Manuel Gräf , Robert Beinert , Gabriele Steidl

We propose a mathematically principled PDE gradient flow framework for distributionally robust optimization (DRO). Exploiting the recent advances in the intersection of Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling and gradient flow theory, we show…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Zusen Xu , Jia-Jie Zhu

Uncertainty propagation and filtering can be interpreted as gradient flows with respect to suitable metrics in the infinite dimensional manifold of probability density functions. Such a viewpoint has been put forth in recent literature, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-10-31 Abhishek Halder , Tryphon T. Georgiou

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

We propose a new approach to measuring the agreement between two oscillatory time series, such as seismic waveforms, and demonstrate that it can be employed effectively in inverse problems. Our approach is based on Optimal Transport theory…

Geophysics · Physics 2022-07-01 Malcolm Sambridge , Andrew Jackson , Andrew P. Valentine

We consider the maximum mean discrepancy ($\mathrm{MMD}$) GAN problem and propose a parametric kernelized gradient flow that mimics the min-max game in gradient regularized $\mathrm{MMD}$ GAN. We show that this flow provides a descent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Youssef Mroueh , Truyen Nguyen

As a counterpoint to recent numerical methods for crystal surface evolution, which agree well with microscopic dynamics but suffer from significant stiffness that prevents simulation on fine spatial grids, we develop a new numerical method…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-06-24 Katy Craig , Jian-Guo Liu , Jianfeng Lu , Jeremy L. Marzuola , Li Wang

It is well-known that many diffusion equations can be recast as Wasserstein gradient flows. Moreover, in recent years, by modifying the Wasserstein distance appropriately, this technique has been transferred to further evolution equations…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-10-15 Kaveh Bashiri , Anton Bovier

Bayesian inference problems require sampling or approximating high-dimensional probability distributions. The focus of this paper is on the recently introduced Stein variational gradient descent methodology, a class of algorithms that rely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 A. Duncan , N. Nuesken , L. Szpruch

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