Special Session 130: Data driven approaches for complex physical systems

Proximal Optimal Transport Divergences and Stable Gradient Flows
Markos Katsoulakis
UMass Amherst
USA
Co-Author(s):    
Abstract:
We introduce proximal optimal transport divergences that provide a unifying variational framework interpolating between classical f-divergences and Wasserstein metrics. From a gradient-flow perspective, these divergences generate stable and robust dynamics in probability space, enabling the learning of distributions with singular structure, including strange attractors, extreme events, and low-dimensional manifolds, with provable guarantees in sample size. We illustrate how this mathematical structure leads naturally to generative particle flows for reconstructing nonlinear cellular dynamics from snapshot single-cell RNA sequencing data, including real patient datasets, highlighting the role of proximal regularization in stabilizing learning and inference in high dimensions.