Multi-Marginal Schrödinger Bridge Matching

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Park, Byoungwoo, Lee, Juho
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Park, Byoungwoo
Lee, Juho
author_facet Park, Byoungwoo
Lee, Juho
contents Understanding the continuous evolution of populations from discrete temporal snapshots is a critical research challenge, particularly in fields like developmental biology and systems medicine where longitudinal tracking of individual entities is often impossible. Such trajectory inference is vital for unraveling the mechanisms of dynamic processes. While Schrödinger Bridge (SB) offer a potent framework, their traditional application to pairwise time points can be insufficient for systems defined by multiple intermediate snapshots. This paper introduces Multi-Marginal Schrödinger Bridge Matching (MSBM), a novel algorithm specifically designed for the multi-marginal SB problem. MSBM extends iterative Markovian fitting (IMF) to effectively handle multiple marginal constraints. This technique ensures robust enforcement of all intermediate marginals while preserving the continuity of the learned global dynamics across the entire trajectory. Empirical validations on synthetic data and real-world single-cell RNA sequencing datasets demonstrate the competitive or superior performance of MSBM in capturing complex trajectories and respecting intermediate distributions, all with notable computational efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_16587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Marginal Schrödinger Bridge Matching
Park, Byoungwoo
Lee, Juho
Machine Learning
Understanding the continuous evolution of populations from discrete temporal snapshots is a critical research challenge, particularly in fields like developmental biology and systems medicine where longitudinal tracking of individual entities is often impossible. Such trajectory inference is vital for unraveling the mechanisms of dynamic processes. While Schrödinger Bridge (SB) offer a potent framework, their traditional application to pairwise time points can be insufficient for systems defined by multiple intermediate snapshots. This paper introduces Multi-Marginal Schrödinger Bridge Matching (MSBM), a novel algorithm specifically designed for the multi-marginal SB problem. MSBM extends iterative Markovian fitting (IMF) to effectively handle multiple marginal constraints. This technique ensures robust enforcement of all intermediate marginals while preserving the continuity of the learned global dynamics across the entire trajectory. Empirical validations on synthetic data and real-world single-cell RNA sequencing datasets demonstrate the competitive or superior performance of MSBM in capturing complex trajectories and respecting intermediate distributions, all with notable computational efficiency.
title Multi-Marginal Schrödinger Bridge Matching
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16587