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: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
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
arXiv:2604. 04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many data-driven decision problems are formulated using a nominal distribution estimated from historical data, while performance is ultimately determined by a deployment distribution that may be shifted, context-dependent, partially observed, or stress-induced.
By Xiuyuan Cheng, Yunqin Zhu, Yao Xie
arXiv:2606. 04092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow matching models learn to transport samples from a simple prior distribution to a complex data distribution.
By Shimon Malnick, Matan Rusanovsky, Ohad Fried, Shai Avidan