KI Seminar (online)

The Kantorovich Initiative Seminar takes place online. To attend, please register for the KI mailing list.

 

Transport- and Measure-Theoretic Approaches for Modeling, Identifying, and Forecasting Dynamical Systems
Yunan Yang (Cornell University)
Measures provide valuable insights into long-term and global behaviors across a broad range of dynamical systems. In this talk, we …
2025, Jan 23 10:00 AM PST Online (zoom)
Kernel Approximation of Wasserstein and Fisher-Rao Gradient flows
Jia-Jie Zhu (Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics, Berlin)
Gradient flows have emerged as a powerful framework for analyzing machine learning and statistical inference algorithms. Motivated by …
2024, Dec 16 10:45 AM PST Online (zoom)
Slides Video
Distributional Preference Alignment of Large Language Models via Optimal Transport
Yousef Mroueh (IBM)

Current LLM alignment techniques use pairwise human preferences at a sample level, and as such, they do not imply an alignment on the …

2024, Dec 13 9:00 AM PST ESB4133 and Online (zoom)
Slides Video
On Parameterizing Optimal Transport with Elastic Costs
Marco Cuturi (Apple ML Research, Paris)
I will introduce our recent work on parameterising OT problems with elastic costs, i.e. ground costs that mix the classic squared …
2024, Dec 9 2:45 PM PST Online (zoom)
Quadratically regularized OT
Alberto González-Sanz (Columbia University)
The quadratically regularized optimal transport problem (QOT) has emerged in the literature as a sparse alternative to entropic …
2024, Nov 21 10:00 AM PST Online (zoom)
Slides Video
Gradient flows in the geometry of Sinkhorn divergences
Hugo Lavenant (Bocconi University)
What happens to Wasserstein gradient flows if one uses entropic optimal transport instead of classical optimal transport? I will …
2024, Oct 31 10:00 AM PDT ESB4133 and Online (zoom)
Slides Video
Trading linearity for elliptiicity: a nonsmooth approach to Einstein's theory of gravity and the Lorentzian splitting theorems
Robert McCann (University of Toronto)

While Einstein’s theory of gravity is formulated in a smooth setting, the celebrated singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose …

2024, Jul 23 2:00 PM PDT PIMSUBC - ESB4133 & Online (zoom)
Video
Introduction to unbalanced optimal transport and its efficient computational solutions
Laetitia Chapel (Institut Agro Rennes-Angers)
Optimal transport operates on empirical distributions which may contain acquisition artifacts, such as outliers or noise, thereby …
2024, May 23 10:00 AM PDT Online (zoom)
Slides Video
Density functional theory and multi-marginal optimal transport: Introduction
Yair Shenfeld (Brown University)
Density functional theory (DFT) is one of the workhorses of quantum chemistry and material science. In principle, the joint probability …
2024, Apr 4 10:00 AM PDT Online (zoom)
Slides Video
Gromov-Wasserstein Alignment: Statistical and Computational Advancements via Duality
Ziv Goldfeld (Cornell University)
The Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance quantifies dissimilarity between metric measure (mm) spaces and provides a natural alignment …
2024, Feb 8 10:00 AM PST Online (zoom)
Slides Video