Liu Shu

h-index14
1paper
536citations

1 Paper

11.3LGFeb 5, 2021
Learning High Dimensional Wasserstein Geodesics

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.