arXiv Machine Learning

Optimal Transport for Network Comparison: A Unified Review with New Spectral Bounds and Machine Learning Applications

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Optimal Transport for Network Comparison: A Review with Machine Learning Applications

The paper reviews the use of optimal transport for comparing undirected, unweighted graphs, focusing on three main distances: Wasserstein, Gromov-Wasserstein, and Bures-Wasserstein. It discusses closed-form solutions for the Wasserstein distance in one dimension, how transport plans identify influential nodes after perturbations, and derives spectral bounds for the Bures-Wasserstein distance to avoid full decompositions. The authors evaluate these distances on synthetic clustering data and a real-world time‑series network for anomaly detection.

By James Hyun, Fran\c{c}ois G. Meyer
arXiv Statistics ML
Sep 4

Discrete Gromov-Wasserstein Duality: Algorithms and Isomorphism Testing

The paper presents a new duality formulation for the Gromov‑Wasserstein distance that applies to all finitely supported metric‑measure spaces, with and without entropic regularization. Using this duality, the authors derive sample‑complexity bounds and limit distributions for empirical GW distances, and introduce algorithms with formal convergence guarantees. These results enable a principled, efficient method for testing isomorphism between distributions on graphs with a fixed number of nodes based on samples.

By Gabriel Rioux, Joanna Marks, Riccardo Passeggeri, Ziv Goldfeld
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

Local-Global Geometric Insights for Graph Neural Networks via Entropic Curvature

arXiv:2607. 22381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Curvature notions on graphs, particularly Ollivier-Ricci and Forman, have emerged as powerful tools for addressing fundamental issues in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) such as oversmoothing and oversquashing, but rely almost exclusively on local edge-level comparisons and therefore fail to certify how information actually propagates over long distances.

By Rachid Caich, Yassine Abbahaddou
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

The Observable Wasserstein Distance

arXiv:2605. 09916v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the observable Wasserstein distance, a framework for deriving lower bounds on the Wasserstein distance between probability measures on Polish metric spaces, designed to bypass the computational intractability of exact optimal transport in large-scale, non-Euclidean datasets.

By Edivaldo Lopes dos Santos, Leandro Vicente Mauri, Washington Mio, Tom Needham