Natesh S. Pillai, Aaron Smith, Vinod Vaikuntanathanmath.PR cs.CR cs.LG
Motivated by a conjecture of Vaikuntanathan and Zamir, we study the pseudo-mixing of Kac's walk on $\mathrm{SO}(n)$: whether short trajectories are indistinguishable from Haar measure by low-complexity tests. We prove that the first $k$ columns mix in Wasserstein distance in $O(n(k+\log n)\log n)$ steps for fixed accuracy, resolving a conjecture of Oliveira. Combining this with a representation-theoretic variance bound, we show that if $T=ω(nk(k+\log n)\log n)$, then every degree-$k$ polynomial normalized to have unit Haar variance has expectation under the $T$-step law within $o(1)$ of its Haar expectation. As an application, we show that this pseudo-mixing estimate can be used to prove the effectiveness of a fast Johnson--Lindenstrauss transform with the usual target dimension.
Distribution steering seeks feedback laws that drive the state law of a dynamical system between prescribed initial and terminal distributions. Optimal transport provides a natural geometric approach, but its implementation generally requires a transport map or coupling in the full state space. Sliced optimal transport avoids this full-dimensional construction through one-dimensional projections. Yet, the resulting projected maps specify only directional displacements and do not by themselves prescribe a realizable feedback law. To this end, we develop a finite-horizon control framework based on sliced optimal transport. At each sampling instant, a projected optimal transport map defines a directional terminal condition, whose minimum-energy realization yields a randomized single-direction controller. Averaging over projection directions gives a deterministic sliced feedback. For the single-integrator dynamics, the averaged feedback makes the sliced Wasserstein distance to the target non-increasing. For Gaussian endpoint laws, it is affine, preserves Gaussianity, and steers the mean and covariance to their prescribed terminal values. We further identify a law-dependent gain that yields linear decay of the sliced Wasserstein distance together with an explicit characterization of the control energy. We also prove that the randomized controller converges to the averaged sliced flow as the sampling period vanishes. Finally, we extend the construction to linear dynamical systems. Reachability-normalized coordinates allow instantaneous realization of the sliced velocity for uniformly fully actuated systems, while local controllability Gramians provide exact finite-step realization for general controllable systems. Numerical examples illustrate the resulting distributional flows.
Francesco Pedrotti, Peter A. Whalleystat.CO cs.LG math.NA math.PR
We provide new estimates in Wasserstein distance for the asymptotic bias of the unadjusted Langevin algorithm, in the classical setting of log-smooth strongly log-concave measures. Our bound implies a Wasserstein mixing time of order $κ\sqrt{d}/\varepsilon$, where $κ$ is the condition number, $d$ is the dimension, and $\varepsilon$ is the target precision: this improves by a factor of $\sqrt{d}/\varepsilon$ over the previous state-of-the-art results.
Kağan Akman, Naci Saldi, Serdar Yükselcs.LG math.OC
We derive finite-sample generalization bounds for Transformers trained with dynamic programming recursions. Building on the doubly lifted, measure-valued formulation of Transformer dynamics, we view data sets as probability laws on pairs of empirical input-output measures, allowing us to interpret the training problem as a finite-horizon Markovian control problem. We then analyze a quantized model, derived by quantizing the state, action, and measure-state spaces, and derive explicit finite-sample generalization bounds using concentration inequalities for empirical laws on finite metric spaces together with a Lipschitz stability estimate for the value function. These bounds are transferred to the base model at the cost of an explicit approximation error. Finally, we show that the same machinery yields a distributionally robust control formulation of the training problem, connecting Transformer generalization to Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization.
Andrea Agazzi, Eloy Mosig García, Dario Trevisancs.LG math.PR stat.ML
We study the infinite-width Gaussian-process limit of random neural networks through the lens of tensor programs, and we provide a quantitative convergence theory in Wasserstein distance. Our main result gives explicit finite-width error bounds, of order inverse square-root of the widths between finite-network executions and their Gaussian-process limits. The framework is architecture-agnostic and covers feed-forward models together with weight-sharing schemes relevant for recurrent and transformer-type architectures.
Chencheng Tang, Xuanyu Xue, Fangyikang Wang +2cs.LG cs.AI
Diffusion models have achieved impressive empirical success in generative tasks, and their convergence theory is now relatively well understood. Motivated by privacy and scalability, recent decentralized diffusion architectures replace a single global velocity field with multiple local experts and a routing mechanism, yielding a sampling dynamics with stochastic expert switching that falls outside standard diffusion convergence analyses. In this work, We study a decentralized diffusion framework with stochastic velocity fields and ODE-based sampling. We establish a convergence guarantee in Wasserstein-2 distance, showing that the distribution of the $N$-step discretization converges to the analytical solution at rate $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2}+\varepsilon)$ in $W_2$, where $\varepsilon$ captures the neural approximation errors. To our knowledge, this is the first $W_2$ convergence result for decentralized diffusion models with an ODE-based sampling scheme.
In this work, we develop theoretical foundation for flow matching with neural-network-parameterized conditional velocity fields. We establish convergence guarantees for gradient descent in the over-parameterized 2-layered ReLU neural network regime. We derive generalization bounds for the conditional velocity-field matching objective. Building on these results, we provide Wasserstein-distance guarantees for the samples generated by the induced flow. Our analysis is based on generalization bound for multi-task representation learning with unbounded losses, which may be of independent interest beyond flow-based generative modeling. These theoretical results are validated through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world image benchmarks.
Filippo Giovagnini, Sotirios Kotitsas, Marco Romitomath.PR cs.LG stat.ML
We consider the infinite-width limit of a fully connected deep neural network with general weights, and we prove quantitative general bounds on the $2$-Wasserstein distance between the network and its infinite-width Gaussian limit, under appropriate regularity assumptions on the activation function. Our main tool is a Lindeberg principle for Deep Neural Networks, which we use to successively replace the weights on each layer by Gaussian random variables.