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Related papers: Variational Analysis in the Wasserstein Space

200 papers

We develop a theory of finite-dimensional polyhedral subsets over the Wasserstein space and optimization of functionals over them via first-order methods. Our main application is to the problem of mean-field variational inference, which…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Yiheng Jiang , Sinho Chewi , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

This paper studies a class of multiagent stochastic optimization problems where the objective is to minimize the expected value of a function which depends on a random variable. The probability distribution of the random variable is unknown…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-18 Ashish Cherukuri , Jorge Cortes

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

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

In the field of global optimization, many existing algorithms face challenges posed by non-convex target functions and high computational complexity or unavailability of gradient information. These limitations, exacerbated by sensitivity to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-16 Xinyu Zhang , Sujit Ghosh

In this paper, we describe a possible generalization of the Wasserstein 2-metric, originally defined on the space of scalar probability densities, to the space of Hermitian matrices with trace one, and to the space of matrix-valued…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2016-10-11 Yongxin Chen , Tryphon T. Georgiou , Allen Tannenbaum

Squared Wasserstein distance is a frequently used tool to measure discrepancy between probability distributions. This distance is typically computed between empirical measures of size $n$ from two underlying random samples. Unfortunately,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-20 Peter Matthew Jacobs , Jeff M. Phillips

A novel framework for density estimation under expectation constraints is proposed. The framework minimizes the Wasserstein distance between the estimated density and a prior, subject to the constraints that the expected value of a set of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-24 Yinan Hu , Esteban G. Tabak

Estimating the density of a distribution from samples is a fundamental problem in statistics. In many practical settings, the Wasserstein distance is an appropriate error metric for density estimation. For example, when estimating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Vitaly Feldman , Audra McMillan , Satchit Sivakumar , Kunal Talwar

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

The geodesic problem in Wasserstein spaces with a metric perturbed by a conformal factor is considered, and necessary optimality conditions are estabilished in a case where this conformal factor favours the spreading of the probability…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Luigi Ambrosio , Filippo Santambrogio

This paper studies the optimization of the KL functional on the Wasserstein space of probability measures, and develops a sampling framework based on Wasserstein gradient descent (WGD). We identify two important subclasses of the…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-04 Van Chien Ta , Thi Mai Hong Chu , Minh-Ngoc Tran

Many scientific systems, such as cellular populations or economic cohorts, are naturally described by probability distributions that evolve over time. Predicting how such a system would have evolved under different forces or initial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-26 Tristan Luca Saidi , Gonzalo Mena , Larry Wasserman , Florian Gunsilius

Optimal transport is widely used in pure and applied mathematics to find probabilistic solutions to hard combinatorial matching problems. We extend the Wasserstein metric and other elements of optimal transport from the matching of sets to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-16 Evan Patterson

The dynamical formulation of the optimal transport can be extended through various choices of the underlying geometry (kinetic energy), and the regularization of density paths (potential energy). These combinations yield different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Kirill Neklyudov , Rob Brekelmans , Alexander Tong , Lazar Atanackovic , Qiang Liu , Alireza Makhzani

Wasserstein barycenters provide a geometrically meaningful way to aggregate probability distributions, built on the theory of optimal transport. They are difficult to compute in practice, however, leading previous work to restrict their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Lingxiao Li , Aude Genevay , Mikhail Yurochkin , Justin Solomon

Chance constraints are frequently used to limit the probability of constraint violations in real-world optimization problems where the constraints involve stochastic components. We study chance-constrained submodular optimization problems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-27 Xiankun Yan , Anh Viet Do , Feng Shi , Xiaoyu Qin , Frank Neumann

In this article, we formulate topology optimization problems concerning the mass distribution as minimization problems for functionals on the Wasserstein space. We relax optimization problems regarding non-convex objective functions on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-22 Fumiya Okazaki , Takayuki Yamada

We study distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems with uncertainty sets consisting of high-dimensional random vectors that are close in the multivariate Wasserstein distance to a reference random vector. We give conditions when…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-30 Brandon Tam , Silvana M. Pesenti

We introduce a new formulation for differential equation describing dynamics of measures on an Euclidean space, that we call Measure Differential Equations with sources. They mix two different phenomena: on one side, a transport-type term,…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2018-09-11 Benedetto Piccoli , Francesco Rossi