arXiv:2606. 27767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimizing functionals over the space of probability measures is now ubiquitous in machine learning.
arXiv:2501.14993v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The proximal algorithm is a powerful tool to minimize nonlinear and nonsmooth functionals in a general metric space. Motivated by the recent...
arXiv:2411. 15067v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate proximal descent methods, inspired by the minimizing movement scheme introduced by Jordan, Kinderlehrer and Otto, for optimizing entropy-regularized functionals on the Wasserstein space.
The paper introduces a distributionally robust method for learning hyperparameters of first‑order convex optimization algorithms. By minimizing a Wasserstein‑robust performance estimation problem over a dataset of problem instances, the approach interpolates between classical learning‑to‑optimize (L2O) and worst‑case PEP design. The authors solve the resulting problem with stochastic gradient descent, provide high‑probability risk bounds, and demonstrate that the learned algorithms outperform both worst‑case optimal and vanilla L2O baselines on logistic regression, LASSO, and linear programming tasks.
arXiv:2504. 10796v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is widely used for decision-making under uncertainty, but its adversarial focus on worst-case loss can lead to overly conservative policies.
arXiv:2502. 17602v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a class of stochastic nonsmooth optimization problems in which an outer variable minimizes the expectation of a pointwise maximum.
arXiv:2412. 20556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study distributionally robust optimization (DRO) for robust inference when the worst-case distribution is continuous, leading to significant computational challenges due to the infinite-dimensional nature of the optimization problem.
arXiv:2602. 04272v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Importance-Weighted Evidence Lower Bound (IW-ELBO) has emerged as an effective objective for variational inference (VI), tightening the standard ELBO and mitigating the mode-seeking behaviour.
arXiv:2606. 02047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Convex Distance Operator Transport (CDOT), the first convex optimal transport framework that aligns distributions across heterogeneous domains by jointly preserving feature correspondence and intrinsic geometric structure.
The paper develops a diffusion approximation for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when the optimization target is a functional on the Wasserstein space ℝ2. By lifting the problem to a Hilbert space via Lions differentiability, the authors construct a Gaussian random-field approximation whose velocity field matches the mean and covariance of the original stochastic gradient. They prove that this Gaussian approximation achieves second‑order weak accuracy, providing a rigorous basis for replacing sample‑driven randomness with analytically tractable Gaussian fluctuations in stochastic optimization over probability measures.
arXiv:2608. 06283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of sampling from target distributions whose potentials are simultaneously non-smooth, subject to superlinear gradient growth, and non-convex.
The paper studies algorithms for computing the Entropic Gromov-Wasserstein (EGW) distance, a measure of discrepancy between metric measure spaces. It introduces Averaged Mirror Descent (AMD), which averages successive Mirror Descent steps and is proven to converge for any cost function, and shows that a dual gradient method with a fixed step size also converges for arbitrary costs, even when iterations are inexact. Empirical comparisons demonstrate that both AMD and the dual gradient method succeed on cases where classical Mirror Descent fails.
arXiv:2405. 15379v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from log-concave distributions supported on convex and compact sets, with a particular focus on the randomized midpoint discretization of both overdamped and kinetic Langevin diffusions in constrained domains.