No abstract

International audienceThis article details a general numerical framework to approximate so-lutions to linear programs related to optimal transport. The general idea is to introduce an entropic regularization of the initial linear program. This regularized problem corresponds to a Kullback-Leibler Bregman di-vergence projection of a vector (representing some initial joint distribu-tion) on the polytope of constraints. We show that for many problems related to optimal transport, the set of linear constraints can be split in an intersection of a few simple constraints, for which the projections can be computed in closed form. This allows us to make use of iterative Bregman projections (when there are only equality constraints) or more generally Bregman-Dykstra iterations (when inequality constraints are in-volved). We illustrate the usefulness of this approach to several variational problems related to optimal transport: barycenters for the optimal trans-port metric, tomographic reconstruction, multi-marginal optimal trans-port and in particular its application to Brenier's relaxed solutions of in-compressible Euler equations, partial un-balanced optimal transport and optimal transport with capacity constraints

Machine learning is increasingly targeting areas where input data cannot be accurately described by a single vector, but can be modeled instead using the more flexible concept of random vectors, namely probability measures or more simply point clouds of varying cardinality. Using deep architectures on measures poses, however, many challenging issues. Indeed, deep architectures are originally designed to handle fixedlength vectors, or, using recursive mechanisms, ordered sequences thereof. In sharp contrast, measures describe a varying number of weighted observations with no particular order. We propose in this work a deep framework designed to handle crucial aspects of measures, namely permutation invariances, variations in weights and cardinality. Architectures derived from this pipeline can (i) map measures to measures -using the concept of push-forward operators; (ii) bridge the gap between measures and Euclidean spacesthrough integration steps. This allows to design discriminative networks (to classify or reduce the dimensionality of input measures), generative architectures (to synthesize measures) and recurrent pipelines (to predict measure dynamics). We provide a theoretical analysis of these building blocks, review our architectures' approximation abilities and robustness w.r.t. perturbation, and try them on various discriminative and generative tasks.

Nonparametric two-sample or homogeneity testing is a decision theoretic problem that involves identifying differences between two random variables without making parametric assumptions about their underlying distributions. The literature is old and rich, with a wide variety of statistics having being designed and analyzed, both for the unidimensional and the multivariate setting. In this short survey, we focus on test statistics that involve the Wasserstein distance. Using an entropic smoothing of the Wasserstein distance, we connect these to very different tests including multivariate methods involving energy statistics and kernel based maximum mean discrepancy and univariate methods like the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, probability or quantile (PP/QQ) plots and receiver operating characteristic or ordinal dominance (ROC/ODC) curves. Some observations are implicit in the literature, while others seem to have not been noticed thus far. Given nonparametric two-sample testing's classical and continued importance, we aim to provide useful connections for theorists and practitioners familiar with one subset of methods but not others.