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 Machine Learning
Aug 28

Gromov-Monge Flow Matching for Equivariant Graph Generation

The paper introduces Gromov-Monge Flow Matching, a method that incorporates permutation-equivariance into generative graph models by aligning graph pairs up to node relabeling using the Gromov–Monge distance. It shows theoretically that quotient couplings can be lifted to aligned representatives without extra cost and that symmetrization yields equivariant flow-matching minimizers, even for categorical endpoints. Practically, the authors build minibatch couplings with Gromov–Wasserstein relaxations and optional outer assignments, improving sample quality in continuous graph and categorical molecular generation while remaining compatible with standard equivariant architectures.

By Moritz Piening, Christian Wald