Related papers: Least-Squares Problem Over Probability Measure Spa…
We study a variational problem on $H^1({\mathbb R})$ under an $L^\infty$-constraint related to Sobolev-type inequalities for a class of generalized potentials, including $L^p$-potentials, non-positive potentials, and signed Radon measures.…
Variational Optimization forms a differentiable upper bound on an objective. We show that approaches such as Natural Evolution Strategies and Gaussian Perturbation, are special cases of Variational Optimization in which the expectations are…
Minimizing a convex function of a measure with a sparsity-inducing penalty is a typical problem arising, e.g., in sparse spikes deconvolution or two-layer neural networks training. We show that this problem can be solved by discretizing the…
Wasserstein barycenters define averages of probability measures in a geometrically meaningful way. Their use is increasingly popular in applied fields, such as image, geometry or language processing. In these fields however, the probability…
The Gromov-Wasserstein distances were proposed a few years ago to compare distributions which do not lie in the same space. In particular, they offer an interesting alternative to the Wasserstein distances for comparing probability measures…
Variational inference (VI) can be cast as an optimization problem in which the variational parameters are tuned to closely align a variational distribution with the true posterior. The optimization task can be approached through vanilla…
We revisit Markowitz's mean-variance portfolio selection model by considering a distributionally robust version, where the region of distributional uncertainty is around the empirical measure and the discrepancy between probability measures…
In this paper we characterize sparse solutions for variational problems of the form $\min_{u\in X} \phi(u) + F(\mathcal{A} u)$, where $X$ is a locally convex space, $\mathcal{A}$ is a linear continuous operator that maps into a finite…
We consider a minimization problem of the form $P(\varphi, g, h):$ $$\min\left\{f(x):= \varphi(x) + g(x) - h(x) \colon x \in \mathbb{R}^n\right\},$$ where $\varphi$ is a differentiable function and $g,$ $h$ are convex functions, and…
In this paper, we propose a minimax linear-quadratic control method to address the issue of inaccurate distribution information in practical stochastic systems. To construct a control policy that is robust against errors in an empirical…
How should researchers select experimental sites when the deployment population differs from observed data? I formulate the problem of experimental site selection as an optimal transport problem, developing methods to minimize downstream…
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…
We consider the problem of recovering an unknown matching between a set of $n$ randomly placed points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and random perturbations of these points. This can be seen as a model for particle tracking and more generally, entity…
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…
We consider a class of parameter-dependent optimal control problems of elliptic PDEs with constraints of general type on the control variable. Applying the concept of variational discretization, [4], together with techniques from the…
We study the convergence of a variant of distributed gradient descent (DGD) on a distributed low-rank matrix approximation problem wherein some optimization variables are used for consensus (as in classical DGD) and some optimization…
We develop the theory of a metric, which we call the $\nu$-based Wasserstein metric and denote by $W_\nu$, on the set of probability measures $\mathcal P(X)$ on a domain $X \subseteq \mathbb{R}^m$. This metric is based on a slight…
We propose an algorithmic framework, that employs active subspace techniques, for scalable global optimization of functions with low effective dimension (also referred to as low-rank functions). This proposal replaces the original…
We study chance constrained optimization problems $\min_x f(x)$ s.t. $P(\left\{ \theta: g(x,\theta)\le 0 \right\})\ge 1-\epsilon$ where $\epsilon\in (0,1)$ is the violation probability, when the distribution $P$ is not known to the decision…
In a variety of applications it is important to extract information from a probability measure $\mu$ on an infinite dimensional space. Examples include the Bayesian approach to inverse problems and possibly conditioned) continuous time…