Reconstructing population dynamics is a central problem in the physical and data sciences. Often, the dynamics are modeled as a Wasserstein gradient flow (WGF): a curve of distributions driven by an energy functional.
arXiv:2505. 07124v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study inverse problems where an unknown potential is observed only through samples from the measure it induces by a convex variational principle.
By Francisco Andrade, Gabriel Peyr\'e, Clarice Poon
The paper presents a new one‑step generative modeling framework for finite state spaces, leveraging discrete Wasserstein geometry to define a target‑relative KL gradient flow over a reversible Markov kernel. The authors implement this flow at the particle level using Markov jumps and encode the resulting transport updates into a latent‑conditioned generator, enabling one‑step inference after training. Experiments on a controlled setting confirm KL dissipation, consistency between particle dynamics and probability flow, and accurate numerical scaling, while a finite‑capacity neural generator successfully tracks the exact transport targets.
By Alessandro Micheli, Andrea Zerio, Samir Bhatt
The paper introduces SUDO, a simulation‑free framework for unbalanced dynamic optimal transport (UDOT) that supports general convex growth penalties beyond the quadratic Wasserstein‑Fisher‑Rao case. By showing that concave penalties lead to degenerate solutions, the authors focus on convex penalties, learning conditional paths and transport costs to solve a semi‑coupling problem and then applying unbalanced flow matching. On benchmark datasets, SUDO matches the accuracy of analytical WFR solvers while being faster than simulation‑based methods, and it also handles asymmetric penalties that better reflect proliferation‑dominant biological priors.
By Junda Ying, Yuxuan Wang, Bowen Yang, Peijie Zhou, Lei Zhang
arXiv:2411. 00214v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Otto's Wasserstein gradient flow of the inclusive (forward) Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence offers a principled framework for analyzing statistical inference algorithms, yet algorithms targeting the exclusive (reverse) KL divergence are rarely studied with such tools.
By Jia-Jie Zhu
arXiv:2608. 11544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose CVaR-penalized Generative Particle Algorithm (CVaR-GPA), a robust, tail-agnostic algorithm for fine-tuning generative models to learn heavy-tailed distributions and capture extreme events, requiring no prior knowledge or estimation of the target's tail characteristics.
By Thejani Gamage, Hyemin Gu, Zhizhen Zhang, Ziyu Chen, Markos Katsoulakis, Luc Rey-Bellet
STITCH-OPE is a model‑based generative framework that uses denoising diffusion to perform off‑policy evaluation (OPE) in high‑dimensional, long‑horizon settings. It generates synthetic trajectories for a target policy by guiding a diffusion model trained on behavior data, subtracting the behavior policy’s score to avoid over‑regularization and stitching partial trajectories to extend horizon length. The authors provide theoretical variance‑reduction guarantees and demonstrate improved mean squared error, correlation, and regret on D4RL and OpenAI Gym benchmarks.
By Hossein Goli, Michael Gimelfarb, Nathan Samuel de Lara, Haruki Nishimura, Masha Itkina, Florian Shkurti
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:2509.19276v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Solving ill-posed inverse problems requires powerful and flexible priors. We propose leveraging pretrained latent diffusion models for this t...
By Tim Y. J. Wang, O. Deniz Akyildiz
This paper introduces a generative model that minimizes the second‑order Wasserstein loss (W₂) by solving a distribution‑dependent ordinary differential equation (ODE) whose dynamics involve the Kantorovich potential of the true data distribution and its current estimate. The authors prove that the time‑marginal laws of this ODE form a gradient flow for the W₂ loss, converging exponentially to the true data distribution, and propose an Euler scheme that recovers this gradient flow in the limit. An algorithm based on this scheme, combined with persistent training, is shown in experiments to outperform Wasserstein GANs in both low‑ and high‑dimensional settings when the level of persistent training is appropriately increased.
By Yu-Jui Huang, Zachariah Malik
arXiv:2102. 09235v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent studies revealed the mathematical connection between deep neural networks (DNNs) and dynamic systems.
By Kuo Gai, Shihua Zhang
The paper investigates Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao (WFR) gradient flows for sampling from probability distributions known only up to a normalisation constant. It demonstrates that for strongly log-concave targets satisfying certain curvature conditions, WFR flows preserve strong log-concavity—unlike pure Wasserstein flows, which only do so in the Gaussian case. Leveraging this property, the authors derive explicit non-asymptotic convergence rates for the symmetrised Kullback-Leibler divergence, showing an additive decomposition into Wasserstein and Fisher‑Rao contributions and eliminating the need for a warm start.
By Francesca Romana Crucinio, Sahani Pathiraja