Related papers: Hessian-guided Perturbed Wasserstein Gradient Flow…
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…
In this paper we bring together some of the key ideas and methods of two disparate fields of mathematical research, frame theory and optimal transport, using the methods of the second to answer questions posed in the first. In particular,…
The Wasserstein barycenter extends the Euclidean mean to the space of probability measures by minimizing the weighted sum of squared 2-Wasserstein distances. We develop a free-support algorithm for computing Wasserstein barycenters that…
The computation of Wasserstein gradient direction is essential for posterior sampling problems and scientific computing. The approximation of the Wasserstein gradient with finite samples requires solving a variational problem. We study the…
This paper considers the problem of regression over distributions, which is becoming increasingly important in machine learning. Existing approaches often ignore the geometry of the probability space or are computationally expensive. To…
This paper studies minimax optimization problems defined over infinite-dimensional function classes of overparameterized two-layer neural networks. In particular, we consider the minimax optimization problem stemming from estimating linear…
Bilevel optimization is a fundamental tool in hierarchical decision-making and has been widely applied to machine learning tasks such as hyperparameter tuning, meta-learning, and continual learning. While significant progress has been made…
Gaussian mixture models form a flexible and expressive parametric family of distributions that has found applications in a wide variety of applications. Unfortunately, fitting these models to data is a notoriously hard problem from a…
We study first-order optimality conditions for constrained optimization in the Wasserstein space, whereby one seeks to minimize a real-valued function over the space of probability measures endowed with the Wasserstein distance. Our…
Recently, optimization on the Riemannian manifold have provided valuable insights to the optimization community. In this regard, extending these methods to to the Wasserstein space is of particular interest, since optimization on…
We consider the optimization problem of minimizing a functional defined over a family of probability distributions, where the objective functional is assumed to possess a variational form. Such a distributional optimization problem arises…
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…
We study the problem of estimating a sequence of evolving probability distributions from historical data, where the underlying distribution changes over time in a nonstationary and nonparametric manner. To capture gradual changes, we…
In this paper, we propose a variant of Riemannian stochastic recursive gradient method that can achieve second-order convergence guarantee and escape saddle points using simple perturbation. The idea is to perturb the iterates when gradient…
Projection robust Wasserstein (PRW) distance, or Wasserstein projection pursuit (WPP), is a robust variant of the Wasserstein distance. Recent work suggests that this quantity is more robust than the standard Wasserstein distance, in…
We consider the population Wasserstein barycenter problem for random probability measures supported on a finite set of points and generated by an online stream of data. This leads to a complicated stochastic optimization problem where the…
The Poisson-Nernst-Planck system of equations used to model ionic transport is interpreted as a gradient flow for the Wasserstein distance and a free energy in the space of probability measures with finite second moment. A variational…
We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of first-order methods for escaping strict saddle points in smooth non-convex optimization. Our main contribution is a Perturbed Saddle-escape Descent (PSD) algorithm with fully explicit…
Optimal transport is a notoriously difficult problem to solve numerically, with current approaches often remaining intractable for very large scale applications such as those encountered in machine learning. Wasserstein barycenters -- the…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…