Special Session 72: Optimal Transport and Mean Field Games with Applications and Computations

Parametrization and Computation of Wasserstein Hamiltonian flows

Shu Liu
UCLA
USA
Co-Author(s):    Hao Wu, Xiaojing Ye, Haomin Zhou
Abstract:
In this work, we propose a numerical method to compute the Wasserstein Hamiltonian flow (WHF), which is a Hamiltonian system on the probability density manifold. Many well-known PDE systems can be reformulated as WHFs. We use parameterized function as push-forward map to characterize the solution of WHF, and convert the PDE to a finite dimensional ODE system, which is a Hamiltonian system in the phase space of the parameter manifold. We establish error analysis results for the continuous time approximation scheme. For the numerical implementation, we use neural networks as push-forward maps. We apply an effective symplectic scheme to solve the derived Hamiltonian ODE system while preseving some of its important quantities such as total energy. The computation is done by fully deterministic symplectic integrator without any neural network training. Thus, our method does not involve direct optimization over network parameters and hence can avoid the error introduced by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) methods, which is usually hard to quantify and measure. The proposed algorithm is a sampling-based approach that scales well to higher dimensional problems. In addition, the method provides an alternative connection between the Lagrangian and Eulerian perspectives of the original WHF through the parameterized ODE dynamics.