Many modern generative modeling methods, including diffusion models, normalizing flows, and flow matching, estimate transport maps or plans between distributions without explicitly targeting an optimal transport (OT) map. In applications like generative modeling, the transport cost itself is irrelevant, and this makes it natural to target maps which are more tractable from either a statistical or computational standpoint.
arXiv:2602.19600v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Many high-dimensional datasets concentrate near a low-dimensional structure embedded in the ambient space. Generative models for such data must con...
By Xinyu Tian, Xiaotong Shen
arXiv:2606. 08953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern generative models often define an entire probability path from a simple prior to the data law, rather than only an endpoint map.
By Lei Luo, Yingzhen Zhang, Jian Yang
arXiv:2505. 06589v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern machine learning repeatedly manipulates probability measures: empirical datasets, generated samples, latent distributions, class-conditional laws, particle systems, weights of wide networks and attention patterns.
By Gabriel Peyr\'e
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.
By Kunwoong Kim, Insung Kong, Yongdai Kim
arXiv:2608. 07042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rectified flows, also called flow matching or stochastic interpolants, are generative models that learn a time-dependent vector field steering a probability curve between two probability distributions, usually referred to as latent and target distributions.
By Antonin Chambolle, Johannes Hertrich