Optimal transport (OT) theory has been been used in machine learning to study and characterize maps that can push-forward efficiently a probability measure onto another.
Recent works have drawn inspiration from Brenier’s theorem, which states that when the ground cost is the squared-Euclidean distance, the “best” map to morph a continuous measure in into another must be the gradient of a convex function.
To exploit that result, , Makkuva et al. (2020); Korotin et al. (2020) consider maps , where is an input convex neural network (ICNN), as defined by Amos et al. 2017, and fit with SGD using samples.
Despite their mathematical elegance, fitting OT maps with ICNNs raises many challenges, due notably to the many constraints imposed on ; the need to approximate the conjugate of ; or the limitation that they only work for the squared-Euclidean cost. More generally, we question the relevance of using Brenier’s result, which only applies to densities, to constrain the architecture of candidate maps fitted on samples.
Motivated by these limitations, we propose a radically different approach to estimating OT maps:
Given a cost and a reference measure , we introduce a regularizer, the Monge gap of a map . That gap quantifies how far a map deviates from the ideal properties we expect from a -OT map. In practice, we drop all architecture requirements for and simply minimize a distance (e.g., the Sinkhorn divergence) between and , regularized by . We study , and show how our simple pipeline outperforms significantly other baselines in practice.
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