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Alberto González-Sanz

Publications and source records attributed to Alberto González-Sanz.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Mode Collapse of Mean-Field Variational Inference

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. It has been empirically observed that MFVI optimizers often suffer from \emph{mode collapse}. For example, when the target measure $π$ is a mixture $π= w P_0 + (1 - w) P_1$, the MFVI optimizer tends to place most of its mass near a single component of the mixture. This work provides the first \emph{theoretical} explanation of mode collapse in MFVI. Starting from two-component mixtures, we introduce the notion of \emph{$\varepsilon$-separateness} to quantify the separation of the mixture components. We derive explicit bounds on the mass that any MFVI optimizer assigns to each component, when $P_0$ and $P_1$ are $\varepsilon$-separated for sufficiently small $\varepsilon$. We further extend this analysis to mixture target distributions with multiple components. Our results reveal that the occurrence of mode collapse crucially depends on the relative position of the components. To address this issue, we propose \emph{rotational variational inference (RoVI)}, which augments MFVI with a rotation matrix. The numerical studies support our theoretical findings and illustrate improved mode coverage with RoVI in Bayesian mixture posteriors, including a real-data example.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2026

When do explicit penalties improve flow matching?

Flow matching can learn structure directly from data, raising the question of when additional constraints improve generation. We study penalties that encode such constraints, with physics-informed flow matching as a motivating example. Satisfying a constraint more closely need not make the generated distribution more accurate. We therefore compare penalised and unpenalised generative modelling through their expected squared $2$-Wasserstein error. Our analysis covers both vector-valued and functional data in a Hilbert-space setting. We first derive geometric criteria that account for constraint violations and the distribution of samples after projection onto the constraint set. We then solve the statistical comparison explicitly for specific velocity-field classes and constraints via flow matching. In this model, penalisation improves accuracy exactly when the reduction in estimation variance outweighs the increase in squared bias. The resulting formula shows how this trade-off depends on sample size, the model class, the noise schedule, and the penalty weight.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2026

Geometry and Convergence of Quadratically Regularized Optimal Transport I

We establish sharp convergence rates for quadratically regularized optimal transport with quadratic cost in the regime of small regularization $\varepsilon$. In particular, we quantify the sparsity of the support of the regularized optimizer. For smooth marginal densities in $\mathbb{R}^d$, this support lies within a distance of order $\varepsilon^{1/(d+2)}$ from the Brenier graph, and every section of the support is sandwiched between balls with radii of that order. The geometry of the support is closely linked to the dual potentials. We show that the potentials satisfy uniform two-sided Hessian bounds and converge uniformly at rate $\varepsilon^{2/(d+2)}$, while their gradients converge at rate $\varepsilon^{1/(d+2)}$. The rates are sharp, and we further identify the regularity threshold where convergence breaks down.

math.OC↗
arXiv2026

Geometry and Convergence of Quadratically Regularized Optimal Transport II

We study quadratically regularized optimal transport with quadratic cost in the regime of small regularization $\varepsilon$, where the support of the optimal coupling is sparse. For smooth marginal densities in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we show that the support contains the graph of the Brenier map. After centering by the Brenier image and rescaling by $\ell=\varepsilon^{1/(d+2)}$, the sections of the support have explicit ellipsoidal limits for $\varepsilon\to0$, except at boundary points, where the limits are half-space profiles. The optimal dual potentials admit expansions at order $\ell^2$, uniformly up to the boundary. We identify the leading coefficients, which consist of a common local profile and opposite global corrections determined by a linear Neumann problem. Finally, we analyze two approximations to the Brenier map, namely the gradient of the dual potential and the conditional mean of the coupling. We obtain the sharp $L^p$ rate $\ell^{1+1/p}$ with exact leading constants and further identify the leading interior and boundary biases. Taken together, our results illustrate that quadratic regularization induces an accurate sparse approximation of classical optimal transport.

math.AP↗
arXiv2026

Central limit theorems and bootstrap for sparse regularized multimarginal optimal transport and barycenters

Wasserstein barycenters are a fundamental tool for the analysis of distribution-valued data, but their computation and statistical analysis become challenging in high-dimensional and multi-sample settings. The unregularized barycenter problem is computationally demanding and suffers severely from the curse of dimensionality, making regularization essential in many applications. While regularized optimal transport methods are widely used, approaches based on entropic penalization tend to overspread mass and may blur the geometric structure of the solution. Motivated by barycenter estimation, we propose a more general methodology based on sparse regularized multimarginal optimal transport (RMOT). Our formulation creates sparse transport plans and is designed to avoid this overspreading effect. We establish consistency, central limit theorems, and bootstrap validity for the optimal potentials and couplings for the empirical RMOT problem. Specializing to sparse regularized barycenters, our results yield a uniform weak limit and bootstrap consistency. Numerical simulations show that sparsity plays a fundamental role in preserving the structure of the solution and avoiding the overspreading behavior typical of entropic regularization.

math.ST↗
arXiv2026

Huber-Wasserstein barycenters for robust distribution-valued data

We propose a robust barycenter for distribution-valued data by incorporating the Huber loss directly into the optimal transport cost. In contrast to metric-space Huber means, which apply the Huber loss to the Wasserstein distance after optimization, our construction acts on individual transport displacements, preserving quadratic behavior locally while limiting the influence of large displacements. The resulting Huber-Wasserstein barycenters form a natural interpolation between Wasserstein means and $L^1$-type Wasserstein medians. We establish the analytical and statistical foundations of this construction. For optimal transport with Huber loss, we prove regularity and uniqueness properties of dual potentials, existence of optimal transport maps, and stability as the Huber parameter varies. For the associated barycenter problem, we prove existence and characterization results, consistency of empirical plug-in estimators, and a finite-sample breakdown point essentially equal to $1/2$. In dimension one, we further derive the pointwise influence function and asymptotic distribution, quantify the associated robustness-efficiency trade-off, and show that displacement-wise Huberization can retain first-order information that is lost by distance-based Huberization under localized shape contamination. Numerical experiments on contaminated distribution-valued data demonstrate the robustness of the proposed barycenters and illustrate their interpolation between mean- and median-like behavior.

stat.ME↗
arXiv2026

Identifiability and Exact Reconstruction of the Optimal Transport Cost on Finite Spaces

The goal of optimal transport (OT) is to find optimal assignments or matchings between data sets which minimize the total cost for a given cost function. However, sometimes the cost function is unknown but we have access to (parts of) the solution to the OT problem, e.g.\ the OT plan or the value of the objective function. Recovering the cost from such information is called inverse OT and has become recently of certain interest triggered by novel applications, e.g.\ in social science and economics. This raises the issue under which circumstances such cost is identifiable, i.e., it can be uniquely recovered from other OT quantities. In this work we provide sufficient and necessary conditions for the identifiability of the cost function on finite ground spaces. We find that such conditions correspond to the combinatorial structure of the corresponding linear program and discuss its computational complexity and implications for cost estimation in statistical linear models.

math.OC↗
arXiv2026

Empirical optimal transport potentials: fast rates and a functional central limit theorem

Optimal transport potentials are fundamental objects in statistics, economics, and machine learning: their gradients generate optimal transport maps, while the potentials themselves act as location-dependent dual prices and sensitivity variables. We study the estimation of the quadratic optimal transport potential when a fixed absolutely continuous reference distribution $μ$ is transported to an unknown distribution $ν$, accessed to via its empirical measure. Our main ingredient is a stability inequality that controls the $L^1(μ)$ distance, modulo additive constants, between a strongly convex potential $φ$ and a convex potential $\widetildeφ$ by a weak dual norm of $(\nabla\widetildeφ)_\#μ-(\nablaφ)_\#μ,$ together with a second-order Wasserstein remainder of logarithmic type. This separation between the leading empirical-process term and the Wasserstein remainder yields faster convergence for potentials than for the corresponding transport maps. Under smoothness and uniform convexity assumptions, the exact semidiscrete Brenier potential converges in $L^1(μ)$ at rate $n^{-1/2}$ for $d\leq3$, at rate $n^{-1/2}(\log n)^{5/2}$ for $d=4$, and at rate $n^{-2/d}(\log n)^{(d+2)/d}$ for $d\geq5$. The polynomial exponents are sharp. In dimensions $d\leq3$, we further establish a nondegenerate function-space central limit theorem and prove consistency of the nonparametric bootstrap. These results yield joint root-$n$ inference for every fixed finite collection of normalization-invariant weighted contrasts of the potential, including regional shadow premia in reference-based risk problems. Finally, we prove matching upper and lower bounds of order $\varepsilon\log(1/\varepsilon)$ for the normalization-invariant sum of the entropic dual potentials.

math.ST↗
arXiv2026

The Influence Function of Transport-based Quantiles

Transport-based quantiles extend univariate quantiles to multivariate distributions via optimal transport. We study the influence function of the transport quantile map $\mathbf{Q}_P$, defined as the optimal transport map pushing a fixed reference measure $μ$ forward to a target distribution $P$. For the Huber contamination $P_t=(1-t)P+tδ_{x_0}$, we prove that the first-order limit $\mathbf{I}(x_0;\mathbf{Q}_P(z)) := \lim_{t\downarrow 0} [\mathbf{Q}_{(1-t)P+tδ_{x_0}}(z)-\mathbf{Q}_P(z)]/t$ exists whenever $x_0\ne \mathbf{Q}_P(z)$ and characterize it uniquely. Specifically, $\mathbf{I}(x_0;\mathbf{Q}_P(z))=\nabla G_{x_0}(z)$, where $G_{x_0}$ is characterized by a uniformly elliptic equation with a Dirac source and a Neumann boundary condition. In every dimension $d\ge 2$, this influence function has a pole-type singularity. For fixed $z\in\operatorname{int}(Ω_μ)$, it remains bounded when $\mathbf{F}_P(x_0)$ stays away from $z$, where $\mathbf{F}_P=\mathbf{Q}_P^{-1}$ is the transport-based distribution function, but diverges as $x_0\to\mathbf{Q}_P(z)$, equivalently as $\mathbf{F}_P(x_0)\to z$. In fact, $\|\mathbf{I}(x_0;\mathbf{Q}_P(z))\|\asymp\|z-\mathbf{F}_P(x_0)\|^{-(d-1)}$. This contrasts with the bounded influence function of univariate quantiles and implies that $\mathbf{I}(X;\mathbf{Q}_P(z))$, for $X\sim P$, has infinite second moment. Numerical experiments further suggest that empirical transport quantiles may exhibit stable-type non-Gaussian fluctuations.

math.ST↗
arXiv2026

Sharp Asymptotics for Regularized Optimal Transport

We study the small-regularization limit for $L^p$-regularized optimal transport with $1<p<\infty$ and for entropically regularized optimal transport (EOT). The exact first-order (respectively, second-order) asymptotics are determined explicitly under mild assumptions on the source and target measures. Our work generalizes the existing results for quadratic and entropic regularization, and connects them by a natural interpolation via $p\in(1,2)$. We derive all these asymptotics in a unified manner by a novel approach that separates the local computation of the optimal profile from the global enforcement of the marginal constraints: convex duality leads to Gaussian profiles for entropy and Barenblatt profiles for $L^p$-regularization, while a quantization construction turns these local profiles into couplings.

math.AP↗
arXiv2026

Distributional Limit Theory for Optimal Transport

Optimal Transport (OT) is a resource allocation problem with applications in biology, data science, economics and statistics, among others. In some of the applications, practitioners have access to samples which approximate the continuous measure. Hence the quantities of interest derived from OT -- plans, maps and costs -- are only available in their empirical versions. Statistical inference on OT aims at finding confidence intervals of the population plans, maps and costs. In recent years this topic gained an increasing interest in the statistical community. In this paper we provide a comprehensive review of the most influential results on this research field, underlying the some of the applications. Finally, we provide a list of open problems.

math.ST↗
arXiv2026

Spatial depth characterizes probability measures

We solve two open problems about spatial (or geometric) quantiles and depth. First we show that in infinite dimension, the spatial distribution function and the associated spatial quantiles characterize the underlying distribution, which has been established in Koltchinski (1997) in finite dimension but remained unknown in infinite dimension. Second, and more surprisingly, we show that the spatial depth also fully characterizes probability measures, which has been an open problem even in finite dimension since the introduction of these concepts in Chaudhuri (1996) and Vardi & Zhang (2000). Our results provide theoretical foundations for nonparametric depth-based statistical inference and introduce novel proof techniques to investigate these questions for other depth and quantile concepts.

math.ST↗
arXiv2026

Finite-sample bounds for regularized optimal transport

We study the sample complexity of regularized optimal transport for general convex regularizations including the Kullback--Leibler divergence and $L^p$ penalties. Our main results are non-asymptotic bias and variance bounds for the empirical cost, with explicit dependence on the regularization parameter and on the intrinsic dimension of the marginals. Our approach simultaneously improves, unifies, and extends existing finite-sample bounds. In particular, we improve the state of the art for entropic optimal transport, and we obtain the first fully quantitative results for $L^p$ regularization with $1<p<\infty$. For the quadratic transport cost, we deduce that quadratically regularized optimal transport (i.e., $L^2$ regularization) estimates the unregularized optimal transport cost at rate $n^{-2/(d+4)}$, the fastest non-asymptotic rate currently available for any estimator based on regularized optimal transport.

math.ST↗
arXiv2026

Stability of Quadratically Regularized Optimal Transport

Quadratically regularized optimal transport (QOT) is a sparse alternative to entropic optimal transport. We develop a quantitative stability theory for QOT under perturbations of the marginals, the transport cost function, and the regularization parameter. The centerpiece is an $L^\infty$-stability result for the dual potentials. Starting from an error bound in an $L^2$-space that varies with the marginals, we use a self-bound for the potentials to derive a local $L^\infty$-Lipschitz bound that is uniform over marginals. This bound also yields stability of the optimal coupling and of its support. In particular, we show that for the quadratic transport cost, the support of the optimal coupling is locally Lipschitz in Hausdorff distance under perturbations of the marginals. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first stability result for the optimal support in regularized optimal transport.

math.OC↗
arXiv2026

Polyak-Lojasiewicz Inequality for Quadratically Regularized Optimal Transport

Quadratically regularized optimal transport (QOT) is an alternative to entropic regularization that yields sparse couplings and avoids numerical instabilities due to exponential scaling. From an optimization viewpoint, the dual QOT objective is concave but features a positive part function which prevents strong concavity and reduces smoothness of optimizers. Consequently, standard arguments for linear convergence of algorithms do not apply. In this paper, we nevertheless establish a quantitative curvature property for the QOT dual. Under mild assumptions covering both continuous and semi-discrete transport problems, we prove a local error bound and a Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality, with explicit constants depending only on the problem primitives. These results are obtained by functional-analytic techniques exploiting that near the optimum, the argument of the positive part function is positive on the interior of the support of the optimal coupling. As applications, we derive linear convergence of the gradient ascent, coordinate ascent, and coordinate gradient ascent algorithms on the dual problem, with explicit contraction rates.

math.OC↗
arXiv2026

Linear Convergence of Gradient Descent for Quadratically Regularized Optimal Transport

In optimal transport, quadratic regularization is an alternative to entropic regularization when sparse couplings or small regularization parameters are desired. Quadratic regularization penalizes transport couplings by the squared $L^2$ norm of their density, or equivalently by the $χ^2$ divergence. While a number of computational approaches have been shown to work in practice, the dual problem is not strongly convex and theoretical convergence results are scarce. We focus on the dual gradient descent algorithm in a continuous setting and establish linear convergence in $L^2$, that is, the $L^2$ distance between the iterates and the limiting potentials decreases exponentially fast. The proof is based on a spectral analysis of the linearized gradient descent operator at the optimum. We show that this operator is a strict contraction and that the nonlinear iteration inherits this property after a burn-in period.

math.OC↗
arXiv2026

Sharp local sparsity of regularized optimal transport

In recent years, the use of entropy-regularized optimal transport with $L^p$-type entropies has become increasingly popular. In this setting, the solutions are sparse, in the sense that the support of the regularized optimal coupling, $\mathrm{supp}(π_\varepsilon)$, shrinks to the support of the original optimal transport problem as $\varepsilon \to 0$. The main open question concerns the rate of this convergence. In this paper, we obtain sharp local results away from the boundary. We prove that the supports $\mathrm{supp}(π_\varepsilon(\cdot \mid x))$ of the conditional measures, $π_\varepsilon(\cdot \mid x)$, behave like balls of radius $\varepsilon^\frac 1 {d(p-1)+2}$. This allows us to show that the regularized potentials are uniformly strongly convex and to derive the rate of convergence of these potentials toward their unregularized limit. Our results generalize the results of (González-Sanz and Nutz, SIAM J.~Math.~Anal.) and (Wiesel and Xu, Ibid.) to the multivariate case and beyond the case of self-transport.

math.AP↗
arXiv2026

Wasserstein Spatial Depth

Modeling observations as random distributions embedded within Wasserstein spaces is becoming increasingly popular across scientific fields, as it captures the variability and geometric structure of the data more effectively. However, the distinct geometry and unique properties of Wasserstein spaces pose challenges to the application of conventional statistical tools, which are primarily designed for Euclidean spaces. Consequently, adapting and developing new methodologies for analysis within Wasserstein spaces has become essential. The space of distributions on $\mathbb{R}^d$ with $d>1$ is not linear, and "mimic" the geometry of a Riemannian manifold. In this paper, we extend the concept of statistical depth to distribution-valued data, introducing the notion of Wasserstein spatial depth. This new measure provides a way to rank and order distributions, enabling the development of order-based clustering techniques and inferential tools. We show that Wasserstein spatial depth (WSD) preserves critical properties of conventional statistical depths, notably, ranging within $[0,1]$, transformation and geodesic invariance, vanishing at infinity, reaching a maximum at the geometric median, and continuity. Regarding robustness, we characterize the breakdown points of the empirical depth regions and the influence function of the WSD. Additionally, the population WSD has a straightforward plug-in estimator based on sampled empirical distributions. We establish the estimator's consistency and asymptotic normality. We also provide a two-sample test for populations of distributions based on the WSD. Finally, extensive simulations and a real-data application showcase the practical efficacy of the WSD.

math.ST↗