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Romain Tavenard

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7 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Differentiable Generalized Sliced Wasserstein Plans

Laetitia Chapel
Romain Tavenard
Samuel Vaiter

Optimal Transport (OT) has attracted significant interest in the machine learning community, not only for its ability to define meaningful distances between probability distributions -- such as the Wasserstein distance -- but also for its formulation of OT plans. Its computational complexity remains a bottleneck, though, and slicing techniques have been developed to scale OT to large datasets. Recently, a novel slicing scheme, dubbed min-SWGG, lifts a single one-dimensional plan back to the original multidimensional space, finally selecting the slice that yields the lowest Wasserstein distance as an approximation of the full OT plan. Despite its computational and theoretical advantages, min-SWGG inherits typical limitations of slicing methods: (i) the number of required slices grows exponentially with the data dimension, and (ii) it is constrained to linear projections. Here, we reformulate min-SWGG as a bilevel optimization problem and propose a differentiable approximation scheme to efficiently identify the optimal slice, even in high-dimensional settings. We furthermore define its generalized extension for accommodating data living on manifolds. Finally, we demonstrate the practical value of our approach in various applications, including gradient flows on manifolds and high-dimensional spaces, as well as a novel sliced OT-based conditional flow matching for image generation -- where fast computation of transport plans is essential.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

One for all and all for one: Efficient computation of partial Wasserstein distances on the line

Laetitia Chapel
Romain Tavenard

Partial Wasserstein helps overcoming some of the limitations of Optimal Transport when the distributions at stake differ in mass, contain noise or outliers or exhibit mass mismatches across distribution modes. We introduce PAWL, a novel algorithm designed to efficiently compute exact PArtial Wasserstein distances on the Line. PAWL not only solves the partial transportation problem for a specified amount of mass to be transported, but _for all_ admissible mass amounts. This flexibility is valuable for machine learning tasks where the level of noise is uncertain and needs to be determined through cross-validation, for example. By achieving $O(n \log n)$ time complexity for the partial 1-Wasserstein problem on the line, it enables practical applications with large scale datasets. Additionally, we introduce a novel slicing strategy tailored to Partial Wasserstein, which does not permit transporting mass between outliers or noisy data points. We demonstrate the advantages of PAWL in terms of computational efficiency and performance in downstream tasks, outperforming existing (sliced) Partial Optimal Transport techniques.

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TMLR Journal 2022 Journal Article

Time Series Alignment with Global Invariances

Titouan Vayer
Romain Tavenard
Laetitia Chapel
Rémi Flamary
Nicolas Courty
Yann Soullard

Multivariate time series are ubiquitous objects in signal processing. Measuring a distance or similarity between two such objects is of prime interest in a variety of applications, including machine learning, but can be very difficult as soon as the temporal dynamics and the representation of the time series, i.e. the nature of the observed quantities, differ from one another. In this work, we propose a novel distance accounting both feature space and temporal variabilities by learning a latent global transformation of the feature space together with a temporal alignment, cast as a joint optimization problem. The versatility of our framework allows for several variants depending on the invariance class at stake. Among other contributions, we define a differentiable loss for time series and present two algorithms for the computation of time series barycenters under this new geometry. We illustrate the interest of our approach on both simulated and real world data and show the robustness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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JMLR Journal 2021 Journal Article

POT: Python Optimal Transport

Rémi Flamary
Nicolas Courty
Alexandre Gramfort
Mokhtar Z. Alaya
Aurélie Boisbunon
Stanislas Chambon
Laetitia Chapel
Adrien Corenflos

Optimal transport has recently been reintroduced to the machine learning community thanks in part to novel efficient optimization procedures allowing for medium to large scale applications. We propose a Python toolbox that implements several key optimal transport ideas for the machine learning community. The toolbox contains implementations of a number of founding works of OT for machine learning such as Sinkhorn algorithm and Wasserstein barycenters, but also provides generic solvers that can be used for conducting novel fundamental research. This toolbox, named POT for Python Optimal Transport, is open source with an MIT license. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2021. ( edit, beta )

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JMLR Journal 2020 Journal Article

Tslearn, A Machine Learning Toolkit for Time Series Data

Romain Tavenard
Johann Faouzi
Gilles Vandewiele
Felix Divo
Guillaume Androz
Chester Holtz
Marie Payne
Roman Yurchak

tslearn is a general-purpose Python machine learning library for time series that offers tools for pre-processing and feature extraction as well as dedicated models for clustering, classification and regression. It follows scikit-learn's Application Programming Interface for transformers and estimators, allowing the use of standard pipelines and model selection tools on top of tslearn objects. It is distributed under the BSD-2-Clause license, and its source code is available at https://github.com/tslearn-team/tslearn. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2020. ( edit, beta )

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ICML Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Optimal Transport for structured data with application on graphs

Titouan Vayer
Nicolas Courty
Romain Tavenard
Laetitia Chapel
Rémi Flamary

This work considers the problem of computing distances between structured objects such as undirected graphs, seen as probability distributions in a specific metric space. We consider a new transportation distance ( i. e. that minimizes a total cost of transporting probability masses) that unveils the geometric nature of the structured objects space. Unlike Wasserstein or Gromov-Wasserstein metrics that focus solely and respectively on features (by considering a metric in the feature space) or structure (by seeing structure as a metric space), our new distance exploits jointly both information, and is consequently called Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW). After discussing its properties and computational aspects, we show results on a graph classification task, where our method outperforms both graph kernels and deep graph convolutional networks. Exploiting further on the metric properties of FGW, interesting geometric objects such as Fr{é}chet means or barycenters of graphs are illustrated and discussed in a clustering context.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Sliced Gromov-Wasserstein

Vayer Titouan
Rémi Flamary
Nicolas Courty
Romain Tavenard
Laetitia Chapel

Recently used in various machine learning contexts, the Gromov-Wasserstein distance (GW) allows for comparing distributions whose supports do not necessarily lie in the same metric space. However, this Optimal Transport (OT) distance requires solving a complex non convex quadratic program which is most of the time very costly both in time and memory. Contrary to GW, the Wasserstein distance (W) enjoys several properties ({\em e. g. } duality) that permit large scale optimization. Among those, the solution of W on the real line, that only requires sorting discrete samples in 1D, allows defining the Sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance. This paper proposes a new divergence based on GW akin to SW. We first derive a closed form for GW when dealing with 1D distributions, based on a new result for the related quadratic assignment problem. We then define a novel OT discrepancy that can deal with large scale distributions via a slicing approach and we show how it relates to the GW distance while being $O(n\log(n))$ to compute. We illustrate the behavior of this so called Sliced Gromov-Wasserstein (SGW) discrepancy in experiments where we demonstrate its ability to tackle similar problems as GW while being several order of magnitudes faster to compute.

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