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Related papers: Muon Dynamics as a Spectral Wasserstein Flow

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We study the problem of policy optimization for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes with softmax policy and nonlinear function approximation trained with policy gradient algorithms. We concentrate on the training dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Andrea Agazzi , Jianfeng Lu

Modeling real-world distributions can often be challenging due to sample data that are subjected to perturbations, e.g., instrumentation errors, or added random noise. Since flow models are typically nonlinear algorithms, they amplify these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Sameera Ramasinghe , Kasun Fernando , Salman Khan , Nick Barnes

We study the quantitative convergence of Wasserstein gradient flows of Kernel Mean Discrepancy (KMD) (also known as Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD)) functionals. Our setting covers in particular the training dynamics of shallow neural…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Lénaïc Chizat , Maria Colombo , Roberto Colombo , Xavier Fernández-Real

Muon and related norm-constrained matrix optimizers have become central to large-scale learning problems. They are formulated as a linear maximization oracle (LMO) over an ambient matrix-norm ball in unconstrained Euclidean space. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yibang Li , Bihari Lal Pandey , Ravi Sah , Andi Han , Cyrus Mostajeran , Pratik Jawanpuria , Bamdev Mishra

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

We consider Wasserstein gradient flows of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) functionals $\text{MMD}_K^2(\cdot, \nu)$ for positive and negative distance kernels $K(x,y) := \pm |x-y|$ and given target measures $\nu$ on $\mathbb{R}$. Since in one…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-05-06 Richard Duong , Nicolaj Rux , Viktor Stein , Gabriele Steidl

We introduce a new method for training generative adversarial networks by applying the Wasserstein-2 metric proximal on the generators. The approach is based on Wasserstein information geometry. It defines a parametrization invariant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Alex Tong Lin , Wuchen Li , Stanley Osher , Guido Montufar

Wasserstein GAN(WGAN) is a model that minimizes the Wasserstein distance between a data distribution and sample distribution. Recent studies have proposed stabilizing the training process for the WGAN and implementing the Lipschitz…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Cheolhyeong Kim , Seungtae Park , Hyung Ju Hwang

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

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

Muon and related normalized optimizers decouple the choice of update direction from the choice of step scale, but their practical performance remains sensitive to the scale of the normalized step. We study adaptive scaling rules for Muon in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yury Demidovich , Abhishek Chakraborty , Grigory Malinovsky , Angelia Nedić , Peter Richtárik

We propose regularization strategies for learning discriminative models that are robust to in-class variations of the input data. We use the Wasserstein-2 geometry to capture semantically meaningful neighborhoods in the space of images, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Alex Tong Lin , Yonatan Dukler , Wuchen Li , Guido Montufar

This paper presents a groundbreaking approach to causal inference by integrating continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) with parametric submodels, enhancing their geometric sensitivity and improving upon traditional Targeted Maximum Likelihood…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Kaiwen Hou

We present a framework for Nesterov's accelerated gradient flows in probability space to design efficient mean-field Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for Bayesian inverse problems. Here four examples of information metrics are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-27 Yifei Wang , Wuchen Li

Recent advances in spectral optimization, notably Muon, have demonstrated that constraining update steps to the Stiefel manifold can significantly accelerate training and improve generalization. However, Muon implicitly assumes an isotropic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Yechen Zhang , Shuhao Xing , Junhao Huang , Kai Lv , Yunhua Zhou , Xipeng Qiu , Qipeng Guo , Kai Chen

Muon has emerged as a strong competitor to AdamW for language model pre-training, yet its behavior at scale is sensitive to weight decay. Recent work has observed that, for Muon without decoupled weight decay, the spectral norm of weight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Kai Lion , Florian Hübler , Bingcong Li , Antonio Orvieto , Niao He

We study a natural Wasserstein gradient flow on manifolds of probability distributions with discrete sample spaces. We derive the Riemannian structure for the probability simplex from the dynamical formulation of the Wasserstein distance on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-19 Wuchen Li , Guido Montufar

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are one of the most practical methods for learning data distributions. A popular GAN formulation is based on the use of Wasserstein distance as a metric between probability distributions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-23 Maziar Sanjabi , Jimmy Ba , Meisam Razaviyayn , Jason D. Lee

We provide a numerical analysis and computation of neural network projected schemes for approximating one dimensional Wasserstein gradient flows. We approximate the Lagrangian mapping functions of gradient flows by the class of two-layer…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-02-27 Xinzhe Zuo , Jiaxi Zhao , Shu Liu , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

Score matching provides an effective approach to learning flexible unnormalized models, but its scalability is limited by the need to evaluate a second-order derivative. In this paper, we present a scalable approximation to a general family…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-19 Ziyu Wang , Shuyu Cheng , Yueru Li , Jun Zhu , Bo Zhang