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Creators/Authors contains: "Chen, Yifan"

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  1. Distributional data have become increasingly prominent in modern signal processing, highlighting the necessity of computing optimal transport (OT) maps across multiple probability distributions. Nevertheless, recent studies on neural OT methods predominantly focused on the efficient computation of a single map between two distributions. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel approach to learning transport maps for new empirical distributions. Specifically, we employ the transformer architecture to produce embeddings from distributional data of varying length; these embeddings are then fed into a hypernetwork to generate neural OT maps. Various numerical experiments were conducted to validate the embeddings and the generated OT maps. 
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  2. ABSTRACT The unadjusted Langevin algorithm is commonly used to sample probability distributions in extremely high‐dimensional settings. However, existing analyses of the algorithm for strongly log‐concave distributions suggest that, as the dimension of the problem increases, the number of iterations required to ensure convergence within a desired error in the metric scales in proportion to or . In this paper, we argue that, despite this poor scaling of the error for the full set of variables, the behavior for asmall numberof variables can be significantly better: A number of iterations proportional to , up to logarithmic terms in , often suffices for the algorithm to converge to within a desired error for all ‐marginals. We refer to this effect asdelocalization of bias. We show that the delocalization effect does not hold universally and prove its validity for Gaussian distributions and strongly log‐concave distributions with certain sparse interactions. Our analysis relies on a novel metric to measure convergence. A key technical challenge we address is the lack of a one‐step contraction property in this metric. Finally, we use asymptotic arguments to explore potential generalizations of the delocalization effect beyond the Gaussian and sparse interactions setting. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available January 30, 2027
  3. In this paper, we study efficient approximate sampling for probability distributions known up to normalization constants. We specifically focus on a problem class arising in Bayesian inference for large-scale inverse problems in science and engineering applications. The computational challenges we address with the proposed methodology are: (i) the need for repeated evaluations of expensive forward models; (ii) the potential existence of multiple modes; and (iii) the fact that gradient of, or adjoint solver for, the forward model might not be feasible. While existing Bayesian inference methods meet some of these challenges individually, we propose a framework that tackles all three systematically. Our approach builds upon the Fisher–Rao gradient flow in probability space, yielding a dynamical system for probability densities that converges towards the target distribution at a uniform exponential rate. This rapid convergence is advantageous for the computational burden outlined in (i). We apply Gaussian mixture approximations with operator splitting techniques to simulate the flow numerically; the resulting approximation can capture multiple modes thus addressing (ii). Furthermore, we employ the Kalman methodology to facilitate a derivative-free update of these Gaussian components and their respective weights, addressing the issue in (iii). The proposed methodology results in an efficient derivative-free posterior approximation method, flexible enough to handle multi-modal distributions: Gaussian Mixture Kalman Inversion (GMKI). The effectiveness of GMKI is demonstrated both theoretically and numerically in several experiments with multimodal target distributions, including proof-of-concept and two-dimensional examples, as well as a large-scale application: recovering the Navier–Stokes initial condition from solution data at positive times. 
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