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Moritz Piening

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3 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

A Novel Sliced Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Distance

Moritz Piening
Robert Beinert

The Gromov–Wasserstein (GW) distance and its fused extension (FGW) are powerful tools for comparing heterogeneous data. Their computation is, however, challenging since both distances are based on non-convex, quadratic optimal transport (OT) problems. Leveraging 1D OT, a sliced version of GW has been proposed to lower the computational burden. Unfortunately, this sliced version is restricted to Euclidean geometry and loses invariance to isometries, strongly limiting its application in practice. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel slicing technique for GW as well as for FGW that is based on an appropriate lower bound, hierarchical OT, and suitable quadrature rules for the underlying 1D OT problems. Our novel sliced FGW significantly reduces the numerical effort while remaining invariant to isometric transformations and allowing the comparison of arbitrary geometries. We show that our new distance actually defines a pseudo-metric for structured spaces that bounds FGW from below and study its interpolation properties between sliced Wasserstein and GW. Since we avoid the underlying quadratic program, our sliced distance is numerically more robust and reliable than the original GW and FGW distance; especially in the context of shape retrieval and graph isomorphism testing.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Joint Metric Space Embedding by Unbalanced Optimal Transport with Gromov-Wasserstein Marginal Penalization

Florian Beier
Moritz Piening
Robert Beinert
Gabriele Steidl

We propose a new approach for unsupervised alignment of heterogeneous datasets, which maps data from two different domains without any known correspondences to a common metric space. Our method is based on an unbalanced optimal transport problem with Gromov-Wasserstein marginal penalization. It can be seen as a counterpart to the recently introduced joint multidimensional scaling method. We prove that there exists a minimizer of our functional and that for penalization parameters going to infinity, the corresponding sequence of minimizers converges to a minimizer of the so-called embedded Wasserstein distance. Our model can be reformulated as a quadratic, multi-marginal, unbalanced optimal transport problem, for which a bi-convex relaxation admits a numerical solver via block-coordinate descent. We provide numerical examples for joint embeddings in Euclidean as well as non-Euclidean spaces.

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TMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

Slicing the Gaussian Mixture Wasserstein Distance

Moritz Piening
Robert Beinert

Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are widely used in machine learning for tasks such as clustering, classification, image reconstruction, and generative modeling. A key challenge in working with GMMs is defining a computationally efficient and geometrically meaningful metric. The mixture Wasserstein (MW) distance adapts the Wasserstein metric to GMMs and has been applied in various domains, including domain adaptation, dataset comparison, and reinforcement learning. However, its high computational cost—arising from repeated Wasserstein distance computations involving matrix square root estimations and an expensive linear program—limits its scalability to high-dimensional and large-scale problems. To address this, we propose multiple novel slicing-based approximations to the MW distance that significantly reduce computational complexity while preserving key optimal transport properties. From a theoretical viewpoint, we establish several weak and strong equivalences between the introduced metrics, and show the relations to the original MW distance and the well-established sliced Wasserstein distance. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our approach through numerical experiments, demonstrating computational efficiency and applications in clustering, perceptual image comparison, and GMM minimization

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