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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

Generative modeling over discrete data has recently seen numerous success stories, with applications spanning language modeling, biological sequence design, and graph-structured molecular data. The predominant generative modeling paradigm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Oscar Davis , Samuel Kessler , Mircea Petrache , İsmail İlkan Ceylan , Michael Bronstein , Avishek Joey Bose

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

Flow Matching has become a cornerstone of modern generative models like Stable Diffusion 3, largely due to the efficiency of its Rectified Flow (RF) variant. The success of RF hinges on iteratively learning straight trajectories, pushing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Vansh Bansal , Saptarshi Roy , Purnamrita Sarkar , Alessandro Rinaldo

We establish a theoretical link between the recently proposed "drifting" generative dynamics and gradient flows induced by the Sinkhorn divergence. In a particle discretization, the drift field admits a cross-minus-self decomposition: an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Ping He , Om Khangaonkar , Hamed Pirsiavash , Yikun Bai , Soheil Kolouri

In this work, we investigate links between the formulation of the flow of marginals of reversible diffusion processes as gradient flows in the space of probability measures and path wise large deviation principles for sequences of such…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-05-16 Max Fathi

Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-24 Anna Korba , Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski , Szymon Majewski , Pierre Ablin

We prove an existence result for a large class of PDEs with a nonlinear Wasserstein gradient flow structure. We use the classical theory of Wasserstein gradient flow to derive an EDI formulation of our PDE and prove that under some…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-07-31 Thibault Caillet , Filippo Santambrogio

We study the quantitative convergence of drift-diffusion PDEs that arise as Wasserstein gradient flows of linearly convex functions over the space of probability measures on ${\mathbb R}^d$. In this setting, the objective is in general not…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-17 Lénaïc Chizat , Maria Colombo , Xavier Fernández-Real

We prove the equivalence between the notion of Wasserstein gradient flow for a one-dimensional nonlocal transport PDE with attractive/repulsive Newtonian potential on one side, and the notion of entropy solution of a Burgers-type scalar…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2013-10-16 Giovanni A. Bonaschi , José A. Carrillo , Marco Di Francesco , Mark A. Peletier

We propose and analyze a conservative drifting method for one-step generative modeling. The method replaces the original displacement-based drifting velocity by a kernel density estimator (KDE)-gradient velocity, namely the difference of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Krishnakumar Balasubramanian

This paper studies the optimization of the KL functional on the Wasserstein space of probability measures, and develops a sampling framework based on Wasserstein gradient descent (WGD). We identify two important subclasses of the…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-04 Van Chien Ta , Thi Mai Hong Chu , Minh-Ngoc Tran

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

Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) update the particles based on the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, the design of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-26 Ziheng Cheng , Shiyue Zhang , Longlin Yu , Cheng Zhang

We provide new convergence guarantees in Wasserstein distance for diffusion-based generative models, covering both stochastic (DDPM-like) and deterministic (DDIM-like) sampling methods. We introduce a simple framework to analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Eliot Beyler , Francis Bach

Generative models can be categorized into two types: explicit generative models that define explicit density forms and allow exact likelihood inference, such as score-based diffusion models (SDMs) and normalizing flows; implicit generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-06 Jingwei Zhang , Han Shi , Jincheng Yu , Enze Xie , Zhenguo Li

We present theoretical convergence guarantees for ODE-based generative models, specifically flow matching. We use a pre-trained autoencoder network to map high-dimensional original inputs to a low-dimensional latent space, where a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-30 Yuling Jiao , Yanming Lai , Yang Wang , Bokai Yan

Deep generative modeling has seen impressive advances in recent years, to the point where it is now commonplace to see simulated samples (e.g., images) that closely resemble real-world data. However, generation quality is generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Abdul Fatir Ansari , Ming Liang Ang , Harold Soh

We present a novel approach to approximate Gaussian and mixture-of-Gaussians filtering. Our method relies on a variational approximation via a gradient-flow representation. The gradient flow is derived from a Kullback--Leibler discrepancy…

Computation · Statistics 2023-06-21 Adrien Corenflos , Hany Abdulsamad

We study the Wasserstein gradient flow of the Sinkhorn divergence when both the source and the target are Gaussian distributions. We prove the existence of a flow that stays in the class of Gaussian distributions, and is unique in the…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-02-20 Mathis Hardion , Théo Lacombe