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 optimal transport


Schrödinger Bridge Matching for Tree-Structured Costs and Entropic Wasserstein Barycentres

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in flow-based generative modelling have provided scalable methods for computing the Schr odinger Bridge (SB) between distributions, a dynamic form of entropy-regularised Optimal Transport (OT) for the quadratic cost. The successful Iterative Markovian Fitting (IMF) procedure solves the SB problem via sequential bridge-matching steps, presenting an elegant and practical approach with many favourable properties over the more traditional Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF) procedure. Beyond the standard setting, optimal transport can be generalised to the multi-marginal case in which the objective is to minimise a cost defined over several marginal distributions. Of particular importance are costs defined over a tree structure, from which Wasserstein barycentres can be recovered as a special case. In this work, we extend the IMF procedure to solve for the tree-structured SB problem. Our resulting algorithm inherits the many advantages of IMF over IPF approaches in the tree-based setting. In the case of Wasserstein barycentres, our approach can be viewed as extending the widely used fixed-point approach to use flow-based entropic OT solvers, while requiring only simple bridge-matching steps at each iteration.


Pairwise Optimal Transports for Training All-to-All Flow-Based Condition Transfer Model

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we propose a flow-based method for learning all-to-all transfer maps among conditional distributions that approximates pairwise optimal transport. The proposed method addresses the challenge of handling the case of continuous conditions, which often involve a large set of conditions with sparse empirical observations per condition. We introduce a novel cost function that enables simultaneous learning of optimal transports for all pairs of conditional distributions. Our method is supported by a theoretical guarantee that, in the limit, it converges to the pairwise optimal transports among infinite pairs of conditional distributions. The learned transport maps are subsequently used to couple data points in conditional flow matching. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on synthetic and benchmark datasets, as well as on chemical datasets in which continuous physical properties are defined as conditions.


Unsupervised Learning for Optimal Transport plan prediction between unbalanced graphs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Optimal transport between graphs, based on Gromov-Wasserstein and other extensions, is a powerful tool for comparing and aligning graph structures. However, solving the associated non-convex optimization problems is computationally expensive, which limits the scalability of these methods to large graphs. In this work, we present Unbalanced Learning of Optimal Transport (ULOT), a deep learning method that predicts optimal transport plans between two graphs. Our method is trained by minimizing the fused unbalanced Gromov-Wasserstein (FUGW) loss. We propose a novel neural architecture with cross-attention that is conditioned on the FUGW tradeoff hyperparameters. We evaluate ULOT on synthetic stochastic block model (SBM) graphs and on real cortical surface data obtained from fMRI. ULOT predicts transport plans with competitive loss up to two orders of magnitude faster than classical solvers. Furthermore, the predicted plan can be used as a warm start for classical solvers to accelerate their convergence. Finally, the predicted transport plan is fully differentiable with respect to the graph inputs and FUGW hyperparameters, enabling the optimization of functionals of the ULOT plan.


Bootstrap Your Uncertainty: Adaptive Robust Classification Driven by Optimal-Transport

Neural Information Processing Systems

Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) offers a promising framework by optimizing worst-case performance over a set of candidate distributions, referred to as the uncertainty set. However, the efficacy of DRO heavily depends on the design of the uncertainty set, and existing methods often perform suboptimally due to an inappropriate or inflexible uncertainty set. In this work, we first propose a novel perspective that casts entropy-regularized Wasserstein DRO as a dynamic process of distributional exploration and semantic alignment, both driven by optimal transport (OT). This unified viewpoint yields two key new techniques: semantic calibration, which bootstraps semantically meaningful transport costs via inverse OT, and adaptive refinement, which adjusts uncertainty set using OT-driven feedback. Together, these components form an exploration-and-feedback system, where the transport costs and uncertainty set evolve jointly during training, enabling the model to better adapt to potential distribution shifts. Moreover, we provide an in-depth analysis of this adaptive process and prove theoretical guarantees of convergence. Finally, we present our experimental results across diverse distribution shift scenarios, which demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving state-ofthe-art robustness.


Inductive Domain Transfer In Misspecified Simulation-Based Inference

Neural Information Processing Systems

Simulation-based inference (SBI) of latent parameters in physical systems is often hindered by model misspecification-the mismatch between simulated and real-world observations caused by inherent modeling simplifications. RoPE, a recent SBI approach, addresses this challenge through a two-stage domain transfer process that combines semi-supervised calibration with optimal transport (OT)based distribution alignment. However, RoPE operates in a fully transductive setting, requiring access to a batch of test samples at inference time, which limits scalability and generalization. We propose a fully inductive and amortized SBI framework that integrates calibration and distributional alignment into a single, end-to-end trainable model called FRISBI. Our method leverages mini-batch OT with a closed-form coupling to align real and simulated observations that correspond to the same latent parameters, using both paired calibration data and unpaired samples. A conditional normalizing flow is then trained to approximate the OTinduced posterior, enabling efficient inference without simulation access at test time. Across a range of synthetic and real-world benchmarks-including complex medical biomarker estimation-our approach matches or exceeds the performance of RoPE, while offering improved scalability and applicability in challenging, misspecified environments.


An Efficient Orlicz-Sobolev Approach for Transporting Unbalanced Measures on a Graph

Neural Information Processing Systems

We investigate optimal transport (OT) for measures on graph metric spaces with different total masses. To mitigate the limitations of traditional Lp geometry, Orlicz-Wasserstein (OW) and generalized Sobolev transport (GST) employ Orlicz geometric structure, leveraging convex functions to capture nuanced geometric relationships and remarkably contribute to advance certain machine learning approaches. However, both OW and GST are restricted to measures with equal total mass, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios where mass variation is common, and input measures may have noisy supports, or outliers. To address unbalanced measures, OW can either incorporate mass constraints or marginal discrepancy penalization, but this leads to a more complex two-level optimization problem. Additionally, GST provides a scalable yet rigid framework, which poses significant challenges to extend GST to accommodate nonnegative measures.


Stability and Oracle Inequalities for Optimal Transport Maps between General Distributions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Optimal transport (OT) provides a powerful framework for comparing and transforming probability distributions, with wide applications in generative modeling, AI4Science and statistical inference. However, existing estimation theory typically requires stringent smoothness conditions on the underlying Brenier potentials and assumes bounded distribution supports, limiting practical applicability. In this paper, we introduce a unified theoretical framework for semi-dual OT map estimation that relaxes both of these restrictions. Building on sieved convex conjugate, our framework has two key contributions: (i) a new map stability bounds that holds without any second-order regularity assumptions on the true Brenier potentials, and (ii) an oracle inequality that cleanly decomposes the estimation error into statistical error, sieved bias, and approximation error. Specifically, our approximation error is measured in the L1 norm rather than Sobolev norm in the existing results, aligning more naturally with classical approximation theory. Leveraging these tools, we provide statistical error of semi-dual estimators with mild and verifiable conditions on the true OT map. Moreover, we establish the first theoretical guarantee for deep neural network OT map estimator between general distributions, with Tanh network function class as an example.


Stochastic Optimization in Semi-Discrete Optimal Transport: Convergence Analysis and Minimax Rate

Neural Information Processing Systems

We investigate the semi-discrete Optimal Transport (OT) problem, where a continuous source measure $\mu$ is transported to a discrete target measure $\nu$, with particular attention to the OT map approximation. In this setting, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based solvers have demonstrated strong empirical performance in recent machine learning applications, yet their theoretical guarantee to approximate the OT map is an open question. In this work, we answer it positively by providing both computational and statistical convergence guarantees of SGD. Specifically, we show that SGD methods can estimate the OT map with a minimax convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ is the number of samples drawn from $\mu$. To establish this result, we study the averaged projected SGD algorithm, and identify a suitable projection set that contains a minimizer of the objective, even when the source measure is not compactly supported. Our analysis holds under mild assumptions on the source measure and applies to MTW cost functions,whic include $\|\cdot\|^p$ for $p \in (1, \infty)$. We finally provide numerical evidence for our theoretical results.


EgoBridge: Domain Adaptation for Generalizable Imitation from Egocentric Human Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Egocentric human experience data presents a vast resource for scaling up endto-end imitation learning for robotic manipulation. However, significant domain gaps in visual appearance, sensor modalities, and kinematics between human and robot impede knowledge transfer. This paper presents EgoBridge, a unified cotraining framework that explicitly aligns the policy latent spaces between human and robot data using domain adaptation. Through a measure of discrepancy on the joint policy latent features and actions based on Optimal Transport (OT), we learn observation representations that not only align between the human and robot domain but also preserve the action-relevant information critical for policy learning. EgoBridge achieves a significant absolute policy success rate improvement by 44% over human-augmented cross-embodiment baselines in three real-world single-arm and bimanual manipulation tasks. EgoBridge also generalizes to new objects, scenes, and tasks seen only in human data, where baselines fail entirely. Videos and additional information can be found at https://ego-bridge.github.io/


Efficient Algorithms for Robust and Partial Semi-Discrete Optimal Transport

Neural Information Processing Systems

The sensitivity of optimal transport (OT) to noise has motivated the study of robust variants. In this paper, we study two such formulations of semi-discrete OT in Rd: (i) the α-optimal partial transport, which minimizes the cost of transporting a mass of α; and (ii) the λ-robust optimal transport, which regularizes the OT problem using the total variation (TV) distance. First, we provide a novel characterization of the optimal solutions in these settings, showing they can be represented as a restricted Laguerre diagram. Second, we exploit this characterization to establish a strong algorithmic connection between the two problems, showing that any solver for one can be adapted to solve the other with comparable precision. Third, we overcome key challenges posed in extending the cost-scaling paradigm to compute these variants of OT and present an algorithm that computes the exact solution up to log(1/ε) bits of precision in nO(d) log(1/ε) time, where nis the support size of the discrete distribution.