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:2607. 04738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reconstructing population dynamics is a central problem in the physical and data sciences.
By Markus Heinonen, Yair Shenfeld, Ricardo Baptista, Daniel Waxman, Dmitry Batenkov, Tim Cooijmans, Eli Bingham
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
The paper introduces Double‑Stitch, a simulation‑free method for learning population dynamics in Wasserstein space. It penalizes the residual of the equation of motion along a learned path, derived from a Clebsch variational principle that avoids gradient velocities. Experiments on synthetic, single‑cell, and ocean vortex data show that Double‑Stitch matches or surpasses gradient‑flow and simulation‑based methods while training 4–14 times faster.
By Fedor Sergeev, Markus Heinonen, Daniel Waxman, Tim Cooijmans, Ricardo Baptista, Dmitry Batenkov, Eli Bingham
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:2610.10278v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We propose a neural algorithm for sampling from distributions specified by unnormalized Boltzmann densities. Our approach is based on the Jordan--Kin...
By Chenguang Duan, Johannes Hertrich, Gabriele Steidl