Structured Matching via Cost-Regularized Unbalanced Optimal Transport

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Auteurs principaux: Pardini, Emanuele, Papagiannouli, Katerina
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Pardini, Emanuele
Papagiannouli, Katerina
author_facet Pardini, Emanuele
Papagiannouli, Katerina
contents Unbalanced optimal transport (UOT) provides a flexible way to match or compare nonnegative finite Radon measures. However, UOT requires a predefined ground transport cost, which may misrepresent the data's underlying geometry. Choosing such a cost is particularly challenging when datasets live in heterogeneous spaces, often motivating practitioners to adopt Gromov-Wasserstein formulations. To address this challenge, we introduce cost-regularized unbalanced optimal transport (CR-UOT), a framework that allows the ground cost to vary while allowing mass creation and removal. We show that CR-UOT incorporates unbalanced Gromov-Wasserstein type problems through families of inner-product costs parameterized by linear transformations, enabling the matching of measures or point clouds across Euclidean spaces. We develop algorithms for such CR-UOT problems using entropic regularization and demonstrate that this approach improves the alignment of heterogeneous single-cell omics profiles, especially when many cells lack direct matches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19075
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structured Matching via Cost-Regularized Unbalanced Optimal Transport
Pardini, Emanuele
Papagiannouli, Katerina
Machine Learning
Applications
Unbalanced optimal transport (UOT) provides a flexible way to match or compare nonnegative finite Radon measures. However, UOT requires a predefined ground transport cost, which may misrepresent the data's underlying geometry. Choosing such a cost is particularly challenging when datasets live in heterogeneous spaces, often motivating practitioners to adopt Gromov-Wasserstein formulations. To address this challenge, we introduce cost-regularized unbalanced optimal transport (CR-UOT), a framework that allows the ground cost to vary while allowing mass creation and removal. We show that CR-UOT incorporates unbalanced Gromov-Wasserstein type problems through families of inner-product costs parameterized by linear transformations, enabling the matching of measures or point clouds across Euclidean spaces. We develop algorithms for such CR-UOT problems using entropic regularization and demonstrate that this approach improves the alignment of heterogeneous single-cell omics profiles, especially when many cells lack direct matches.
title Structured Matching via Cost-Regularized Unbalanced Optimal Transport
topic Machine Learning
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19075