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We present a novel approximate inference method for diffusion processes, based on the Wasserstein gradient flow formulation of the diffusion. In this formulation, the time-dependent density of the diffusion is derived as the limit of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-13 Charlie Frogner , Tomaso Poggio

Schr\"{o}dinger bridge is a stochastic optimal control problem to steer a given initial state density to another, subject to controlled diffusion and deadline constraints. A popular method to numerically solve the Schr\"{o}dinger bridge…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-14 Alexis M. H. Teter , Yongxin Chen , Abhishek Halder

The squared Wasserstein distance is a natural quantity to compare probability distributions in a non-parametric setting. This quantity is usually estimated with the plug-in estimator, defined via a discrete optimal transport problem which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-30 Lenaic Chizat , Pierre Roussillon , Flavien Léger , François-Xavier Vialard , Gabriel Peyré

Algorithms based on discretizing Langevin diffusion are popular tools for sampling from high-dimensional distributions. We develop novel connections between such Monte Carlo algorithms, the theory of Wasserstein gradient flow, and the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-05-13 Espen Bernton

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 study the Schr\"odinger bridge problem when the endpoint distributions are available only through samples. Classical computational approaches estimate Schr\"odinger potentials via Sinkhorn iterations on empirical measures and then…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-10 Denis Belomestny , Alexey Naumov , Nikita Puchkin , Denis Suchkov

This paper aims to conduct a comprehensive theoretical analysis of current diffusion models. We introduce a novel generative learning methodology utilizing the Schr{\"o}dinger bridge diffusion model in latent space as the framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-24 Yuling Jiao , Lican Kang , Huazhen Lin , Jin Liu , Heng Zuo

Wasserstein gradient flow has emerged as a promising approach to solve optimization problems over the space of probability distributions. A recent trend is to use the well-known JKO scheme in combination with input convex neural networks to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Jiaojiao Fan , Qinsheng Zhang , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Yongxin Chen

Wasserstein gradient flow provides a general framework for minimizing an energy functional $J$ over the space of probability measures on a Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$. Its canonical time-discretization, the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Peter Halmos , Boris Hanin

The Schr\"odinger bridge problem seeks the optimal stochastic process that connects two given probability distributions with minimal energy modification. While the Sinkhorn algorithm is widely used to solve the static optimal transport…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-28 Ibuki Maeda , Rentian Yao , Atsushi Nitanda

Wasserstein barycenters provide a principled approach for aggregating probability measures, while preserving the geometry of their ambient space. Existing discrete methods are not scalable as they assume access to the complete set of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Eduardo Fernandes Montesuma , Yassir Bendou , Mike Gartrell

Erwin Schroedinger posed, and to a large extent solved in 1931/32 the problem of finding the most likely random evolution between two continuous probability distributions. This article considers this problem in the case when only samples of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-06-07 Michele Pavon , Esteban G Tabak , Giulio Trigila

We study the Schr\"{o}dinger bridge problem (SBP) with nonlinear prior dynamics. In control-theoretic language, this is a problem of minimum effort steering of a given joint state probability density function (PDF) to another over a finite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-17 Kenneth F. Caluya , Abhishek Halder

Over the past fifteen years, the theory of Wasserstein gradient flows of convex (or, more generally, semiconvex) energies has led to advances in several areas of partial differential equations and analysis. In this work, we extend the…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2017-05-04 Katy Craig

Recent advances in flow-based generative modelling have provided scalable methods for computing the Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB) between distributions, a dynamic form of entropy-regularised Optimal Transport (OT) for the quadratic cost. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-04 Samuel Howard , Peter Potaptchik , George Deligiannidis

This paper exploit the equivalence between the Schr\"odinger Bridge problem and the entropy penalized optimal transport in order to find a different approach to the duality, in the spirit of optimal transport. This approach results in a…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-11-19 Simone Di Marino , Augusto Gerolin

Variational inference, such as the mean-field (MF) approximation, requires certain conjugacy structures for efficient computation. These can impose unnecessary restrictions on the viable prior distribution family and further constraints on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-09-11 Rentian Yao , Yun Yang

The nested distance builds on the Wasserstein distance to quantify the difference of stochastic processes, including also the information modelled by filtrations. The Sinkhorn divergence is a relaxation of the Wasserstein distance, which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-11 Alois Pichler , Michael Weinhardt

Diffusion-based models on continuous spaces have seen substantial recent progress through the mathematical framework of gradient flows, leveraging the Wasserstein-2 (${W}_2$) metric via the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) scheme. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Dario Rancati , Jan Maas , Francesco Locatello

Variational inference is a technique that approximates a target distribution by optimizing within the parameter space of variational families. On the other hand, Wasserstein gradient flows describe optimization within the space of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-01 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu