arXiv AI

Deep Barycentric Regression for Optimal Transport Map Estimation and its Statistical Optimality

The paper introduces BROT, a two‑step approach for estimating optimal transport maps. First, it computes the unregularized OT plan, then fits a deep neural network to the resulting barycentric targets using least‑squares regression. The authors prove that, under standard regularity conditions, BROT achieves the minimax convergence rate when the true OT map is Lipschitz, and demonstrate its effectiveness on synthetic data, images, and downstream tasks such as single‑cell perturbation prediction and unsupervised domain adaptation.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

Barron Optimal Transport I: Generative Modeling

The paper introduces a new optimal transport framework that uses the Barron energy—an intrinsic neural network complexity measure—instead of the traditional kinetic energy. By modeling transport as deep residual networks that map a reference distribution to a target distribution, the authors define a new metric on probability measures and analyze its properties for generative modeling. They demonstrate that diffusion generative models are suboptimal in this Barron geometry and explore how adaptivity can improve alternative generative approaches.

By Evan Dogariu, Joan Bruna
arXiv Statistics ML
Sep 28

Brenier Meets Adversarial Training: Optimal Transport Geometry for Robust Learning

The paper introduces a penalized distributionally robust optimization framework that allows an adversary to choose any distribution while incurring a Wasserstein penalty for deviating from the empirical distribution. It shows that the adversary’s problem can be reformulated as optimizing transport maps that push empirical samples to adversarial ones, proving that optimal maps are cyclically monotone. The authors argue that standard per-sample adversarial training violates this property and propose two remedies—multi-start particle ascent and input-convex neural network parameterization—to enforce cyclical monotonicity, demonstrating improved robustness and generalization in experiments on regression, image classification, and control tasks.

By Alireza Abdollahpoorrostam, Ehsan Sharifian, Buse \c{S}en, Marco Cuturi, Daniel Kuhn
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Distribution-Conditioned Transport

The paper introduces Distribution‑Conditioned Transport (DCT), a framework that learns transport maps conditioned on embeddings of source and target distributions, allowing generalization to unseen distribution pairs. DCT supports semi‑supervised learning for distributional forecasting by leveraging distributions observed at only one condition. It is agnostic to the transport mechanism and is demonstrated on synthetic benchmarks and four biological applications, including batch effect transfer in single‑cell genomics and modeling T‑cell receptor sequence evolution.

By Nic Fishman, Gokul Gowri, Paolo L. B. Fischer, Marinka Zitnik, Omar Abudayyeh, Jonathan Gootenberg