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:2505. 07124v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study inverse problems where an unknown potential is observed only through samples from the measure it induces by a convex variational principle.
By Francisco Andrade, Gabriel Peyr\'e, Clarice Poon
The paper presents a new one‑step generative modeling framework for finite state spaces, leveraging discrete Wasserstein geometry to define a target‑relative KL gradient flow over a reversible Markov kernel. The authors implement this flow at the particle level using Markov jumps and encode the resulting transport updates into a latent‑conditioned generator, enabling one‑step inference after training. Experiments on a controlled setting confirm KL dissipation, consistency between particle dynamics and probability flow, and accurate numerical scaling, while a finite‑capacity neural generator successfully tracks the exact transport targets.
By Alessandro Micheli, Andrea Zerio, Samir Bhatt
The paper introduces SUDO, a simulation‑free framework for unbalanced dynamic optimal transport (UDOT) that supports general convex growth penalties beyond the quadratic Wasserstein‑Fisher‑Rao case. By showing that concave penalties lead to degenerate solutions, the authors focus on convex penalties, learning conditional paths and transport costs to solve a semi‑coupling problem and then applying unbalanced flow matching. On benchmark datasets, SUDO matches the accuracy of analytical WFR solvers while being faster than simulation‑based methods, and it also handles asymmetric penalties that better reflect proliferation‑dominant biological priors.
By Junda Ying, Yuxuan Wang, Bowen Yang, Peijie Zhou, Lei Zhang
arXiv:2411. 00214v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Otto's Wasserstein gradient flow of the inclusive (forward) Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence offers a principled framework for analyzing statistical inference algorithms, yet algorithms targeting the exclusive (reverse) KL divergence are rarely studied with such tools.
By Jia-Jie Zhu
arXiv:2608. 11544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose CVaR-penalized Generative Particle Algorithm (CVaR-GPA), a robust, tail-agnostic algorithm for fine-tuning generative models to learn heavy-tailed distributions and capture extreme events, requiring no prior knowledge or estimation of the target's tail characteristics.
By Thejani Gamage, Hyemin Gu, Zhizhen Zhang, Ziyu Chen, Markos Katsoulakis, Luc Rey-Bellet