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We give sharp conditions for global in time existence of gradient flow solutions to a Cahn-Hilliard-type equation, with backwards second order degenerate diffusion, in any dimension and for general initial data. Our equation is the…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2023-07-28 José Antonio Carrillo , Antonio Esposito , Carles Falcó , Alejandro Fernández-Jiménez

A comprehensive methodology for establishing the existence of gradient flows for cross-diffusion systems with respect to suitable energies is proposed. The approach is based on the construction of piecewise-in-time constant approximations…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Mathias Dus , Ansgar Jüngel

Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO) is a recently proposed reinforcement learning algorithm that leverages Wasserstein gradient flows to optimize stochastic policies in continuous action spaces. Despite its empirical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 David Šiška , Yufei Zhang

Combining the classical theory of optimal transport with modern operator splitting techniques, we develop a new numerical method for nonlinear, nonlocal partial differential equations, arising in models of porous media, materials science,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-02-09 Jose A. Carrillo , Katy Craig , Li Wang , Chaozhen Wei

In this work, we investigate a variational formulation for a time-fractional Fokker-Planck equation which arises in the study of complex physical systems involving anomalously slow diffusion. The model involves a fractional-order Caputo…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-06-05 Manh Hong Duong , Bangti Jin

We study ``nonlocal diffusion equations'' of the form \[ \partial_{t}\frac{d\rho_{t}}{d\pi}(x)+\int_{X}\left(\frac{d\rho_{t}}{d\pi}(x)-\frac{d\rho_{t}}{d\pi}(y)\right)\eta(x,y)d\pi(y)=0\qquad(\dagger) \] where $X$ is either $\mathbb{R}^{d}$…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-11-03 Andrew Warren

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

While behavior cloning with flow/diffusion policies excels at learning complex skills from demonstrations, it remains vulnerable to distributional shift, and standard RL methods struggle to fine-tune these models due to their iterative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mingyang Sun , Pengxiang Ding , Weinan Zhang , Donglin Wang

In this paper, we propose a novel numerical scheme to optimize the gradient flows for learning energy-based models (EBMs). From a perspective of physical simulation, we redefine the problem of approximating the gradient flow utilizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Yang Wu , Pengxu Wei , Liang Lin

In order to sample from an unnormalized probability density function, we propose to combine continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) with rejection-resampling steps based on importance weights. We relate the iterative training of CNFs with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-14 Johannes Hertrich , Robert Gruhlke

We consider a class of time-fractional porous medium equations with nonlocal pressure. We show the existence of their weak solutions by proposing a JKO scheme for modified Wasserstein distance and a square fractional Sobolev norm. Moreover,…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-09-16 Nhan-Phu Chung , Thanh-Son Trinh

Wasserstein gradient flows have become a central tool for optimization problems over probability measures. A natural numerical approach is forward-Euler time discretization. We show, however, that even in the simple case where the energy…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-10-16 Yewei Xu , Qin Li

A normalizing flow (NF) is a mapping that transforms a chosen probability distribution to a normal distribution. Such flows are a common technique used for data generation and density estimation in machine learning and data science. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-01 Alexander Vidal , Samy Wu Fung , Luis Tenorio , Stanley Osher , Levon Nurbekyan

As a counterpoint to recent numerical methods for crystal surface evolution, which agree well with microscopic dynamics but suffer from significant stiffness that prevents simulation on fine spatial grids, we develop a new numerical method…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-06-24 Katy Craig , Jian-Guo Liu , Jianfeng Lu , Jeremy L. Marzuola , Li Wang

Gradient-flow (GF) viewpoints unify and illuminate optimization algorithms, yet most GF analyses focus on unconstrained settings. We develop a geometry-respecting framework for constrained problems by (i) reparameterizing feasible sets with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-29 Valentin Leplat

This work is the third part of a program initiated in arXiv:2111.13258, arXiv:2302.06571 aiming at the development of an intrinsic geometric well-posedness theory for Hamilton-Jacobi equations related to controlled gradient flow problems in…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-02-02 Giovanni Conforti , Richard C. Kraaij , Luca Tamanini , Daniela Tonon

We prove that the (square root) Fisher information functional is a strong Wasserstein upper gradient of the entropy on non-convex Riemannian domains. This fills a gap in the literature by allowing one to completely dispense from…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-12-08 Jean-Baptiste Casteras , Marco Flaim , Léonard Monsaingeon

Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao (WFR) gradient flows have been recently proposed as a powerful sampling tool that combines the advantages of pure Wasserstein (W) and pure Fisher-Rao (FR) gradient flows. Existing algorithmic developments implicitly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-02 Francesca Romana Crucinio , Sahani Pathiraja

On the flat torus in any dimension we prove existence of a solution to the TV Wasserstein gradient flow equation, only assuming that the initial density $\rho_0$ is bounded from below and above by strictly positive constants. This solution…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Kexin Lin , Filippo Santambrogio

We design and compute first-order implicit-in-time variational schemes with high-order spatial discretization for initial value gradient flows in generalized optimal transport metric spaces. We first review some examples of gradient flows…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-08-16 Guosheng Fu , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li