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We analyze the gradient flow of a potential energy in the space of probability measures when we substitute the optimal transport geometry with a geometry based on Sinkhorn divergences, a debiased version of entropic optimal transport. This…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-11-19 Mathis Hardion , Hugo Lavenant

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

Wasserstein Gradient Flows (WGF) with respect to specific functionals have been widely used in the machine learning literature. Recently, neural networks have been adopted to approximate certain intractable parts of the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Huminhao Zhu , Fangyikang Wang , Chao Zhang , Hanbin Zhao , Hui Qian

Many tasks in machine learning and signal processing can be solved by minimizing a convex function of a measure. This includes sparse spikes deconvolution or training a neural network with a single hidden layer. For these problems, we study…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-30 Lenaic Chizat , Francis Bach

Gradient descent-ascent (GDA) flows play a central role in finding saddle points of bivariate functionals, with applications in optimization, game theory, and robust control. While they are well-understood in Hilbert and Banach spaces via…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2025-06-26 Noboru Isobe , Sho Shimoyama

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

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

Many studies have been conducted on flows of probability measures, often in terms of gradient flows. We utilize a generalized notion of derivatives with respect to time to model the instantaneous evolution of empirically observed…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-16 Yaqing Chen , Hans-Georg Müller

We study a system of drift-diffusion PDEs for a potentially infinite number of incompressible phases, subject to a joint pointwise volume constraint. Our analysis is based on the interpretation as a collection of coupled Wasserstein…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-11-22 Clément Cancès , Daniel Matthes , Ismael Medina , Bernhard Schmitzer

For addressing optimisation tasks on finite dimensional quantum systems, we give a comprehensive account of the foundations of gradient flows on Riemannian manifolds including new developments: we extend former results from Lie groups such…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2010-12-07 T. Schulte-Herbrueggen , S. J. Glaser , G. Dirr , U. Helmke

We consider a class of time-homogeneous diffusion processes on $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ with common invariant measure but varying volatility matrices. In Euclidean space, we show via stochastic control of the diffusion coefficient that the…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Bertram Tschiderer

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

One of the most popular approaches for solving total variation-regularized optimization problems in the space of measures are Particle Gradient Flows (PGFs). These restrict the problem to linear combinations of Dirac deltas and then perform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-31 Christian Amend , Marcello Carioni , Konstantinos Zemas

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

The sliced-Wasserstein flow is an evolution equation where a probability density evolves in time, advected by a velocity field computed as the average among directions in the unit sphere of the optimal transport displacements from its 1D…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-13 Giacomo Cozzi , Filippo Santambogio

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

Many applications in machine learning involve data represented as probability distributions. The emergence of such data requires radically novel techniques to design tractable gradient flows on probability distributions over this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Clément Bonet , Christophe Vauthier , Anna Korba

We investigate proximal descent methods, inspired by the minimizing movement scheme introduced by Jordan, Kinderlehrer and Otto, for optimizing entropy-regularized functionals on the Wasserstein space. We establish linear convergence under…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-25 Razvan-Andrei Lascu , Mateusz B. Majka , David Šiška , Łukasz Szpruch

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

Entropy-regularized optimal transport, which has strong links to the Schr\"odinger bridge problem in statistical mechanics, enjoys a variety of applications from trajectory inference to generative modeling. A major driver of renewed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-27 Anand Srinivasan , Jean-Jacques Slotine