Shaojun Ma

Jiaojiao Fan, Shu Liu, Shaojun Ma et al.

Monge map refers to the optimal transport map between two probability distributions and provides a principled approach to transform one distribution to another. Neural network based optimal transport map solver has gained great attention in recent years. Along this line, we present a scalable algorithm for computing the neural Monge map between two probability distributions. Our algorithm is based on a weak form of the optimal transport problem, thus it only requires samples from the marginals instead of their analytic expressions, and can accommodate optimal transport between two distributions with different dimensions. Our algorithm is suitable for general cost functions, compared with other existing methods for estimating Monge maps using samples, which are usually for quadratic costs. The performance of our algorithms is demonstrated through a series of experiments with both synthetic and realistic data, including text-to-image generation and image inpainting tasks.

Shaojun Ma, Haomin Zhou, Hongyuan Zha

We propose a novel mean field games (MFGs) based GAN(generative adversarial network) framework. To be specific, we utilize the Hopf formula in density space to rewrite MFGs as a primal-dual problem so that we are able to train the model via neural networks and samples. Our model is flexible due to the freedom of choosing various functionals within the Hopf formula. Moreover, our formulation mathematically avoids Lipschitz-1 constraint. The correctness and efficiency of our method are validated through several experiments.

Shu Liu, Shaojun Ma, Yongxin Chen et al.

We propose a new formulation and learning strategy for computing the Wasserstein geodesic between two probability distributions in high dimensions. By applying the method of Lagrange multipliers to the dynamic formulation of the optimal transport (OT) problem, we derive a minimax problem whose saddle point is the Wasserstein geodesic. We then parametrize the functions by deep neural networks and design a sample based bidirectional learning algorithm for training. The trained networks enable sampling from the Wasserstein geodesic. As by-products, the algorithm also computes the Wasserstein distance and OT map between the marginal distributions. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithms through a series of experiments with both synthetic and realistic data.

Shaojun Ma, Haodong Sun, Xiaojing Ye et al.

Inverse optimal transport (OT) refers to the problem of learning the cost function for OT from observed transport plan or its samples. In this paper, we derive an unconstrained convex optimization formulation of the inverse OT problem, which can be further augmented by any customizable regularization. We provide a comprehensive characterization of the properties of inverse OT, including uniqueness of solutions. We also develop two numerical algorithms, one is a fast matrix scaling method based on the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm for discrete OT, and the other one is a learning based algorithm that parameterizes the cost function as a deep neural network for continuous OT. The novel framework proposed in the work avoids repeatedly solving a forward OT in each iteration which has been a thorny computational bottleneck for the bi-level optimization in existing inverse OT approaches. Numerical results demonstrate promising efficiency and accuracy advantages of the proposed algorithms over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Shaojun Ma, Shu Liu, Hongyuan Zha et al.

Learning nonlinear dynamics from aggregate data is a challenging problem because the full trajectory of each individual is not available, namely, the individual observed at one time may not be observed at the next time point, or the identity of individual is unavailable. This is in sharp contrast to learning dynamics with full trajectory data, on which the majority of existing methods are based. We propose a novel method using the weak form of Fokker Planck Equation (FPE) -- a partial differential equation -- to describe the density evolution of data in a sampled form, which is then combined with Wasserstein generative adversarial network (WGAN) in the training process. In such a sample-based framework we are able to learn the nonlinear dynamics from aggregate data without explicitly solving the partial differential equation (PDE) FPE. We demonstrate our approach in the context of a series of synthetic and real-world data sets.