arXiv AI

The Geometry Behind Diffusion and Flow Matching: Gradient Flows and Geodesics in Wasserstein Space

arXiv:2606. 24157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The space $\mathcal{P}_2(\mathbb{R}^d$) of probability measures with finite second moment carries a natural geometry: the quadratic Wasserstein distance W_2 makes it a complete metric space and, following Otto, a (formal) Riemannian manifold whose geodesics are the optimal-transport interpolations.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

Free Denoising Diffusion Models

arXiv:2510. 22778v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a free-probabilistic framework for denoising diffusion, in which the data is a self-adjoint operator and its law a spectral distribution.

By Swagatam Das
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Robustness and Structure Preservation in Flow-Based Generative Models via Wasserstein Path-Space Divergences

arXiv:2410. 01244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a novel Wasserstein-1 ($W_1$) path-space divergence for stochastic and deterministic dynamics and establish a Wasserstein Uncertainty Propagation (WUP) theorem that bounds the $W_1$ distance between terminal distributions by the proposed divergence, equivalently characterized by a weighted $L^2$ discrepancy between the underlying drifts and the $W_1$ distance between their initial measures.

By Ziyu Chen, Markos A. Katsoulakis, Benjamin J. Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

RW-Flow: One-Step Generation on Compact Manifolds via Wasserstein Gradient Flows

RW-Flow presents a new one‑step generative framework for data on compact manifolds, leveraging Wasserstein gradient flows. The authors derive a necessary and sufficient identifiability condition for velocity fields on compact, connected Riemannian manifolds, showing that a symmetric, Lipschitz‑continuous cost function yields identifiability iff its Gibbs kernel is nondegenerate. Experiments on geospatial events, protein and RNA torsion angles, and discretized manifolds demonstrate that RW‑Flow surpasses existing one‑step methods across most benchmark settings.

By Ualibyek Nurgulan, Seungwoo Yoo, Prin Phunyaphibarn, Minhyuk Sung
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Entropy-Controlled Flow Matching

arXiv:2602. 22265v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern vision generators transport a base distribution to data through time-indexed measures, implemented as deterministic flows (ODEs) or stochastic diffusions (SDEs).

By Chika Maduabuchi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Wasserstein Formulation of Reinforcement Learning. An Optimal Transport Perspective on Policy Optimization

The paper introduces a geometric framework for reinforcement learning that treats policies as mappings into the Wasserstein space of action probabilities. It establishes a Riemannian structure induced by stationary distributions, defines the tangent space of policies, and characterizes geodesics while addressing measurability concerns. The authors formulate a general RL optimization problem, construct a gradient flow via Otto's calculus, compute the gradient and Hessian of the energy, and demonstrate the approach with numerical examples for low‑dimensional problems and neural‑network‑parameterized policies for high‑dimensional settings.

By Mathias Dus (IRMA)