Variational Entropic Optimal Transport

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02241v1
• Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:48:44 GMT
• Title: Variational Entropic Optimal Transport
• Authors: Roman Dyachenko, Nikita Gushchin, Kirill Sokolov, Petr Mokrov, Evgeny Burnaev, Alexander Korotin,
• Abstract summary: We propose Variational Entropic Optimal Transport (VarEOT) for domain translation problems.<n>VarEOT is based on an exact variational reformulation of the log-partition $log mathbbE[exp(cdot)$ as a tractable generalization over an auxiliary positive normalizer.<n> Experiments on synthetic data and unpaired image-to-image translation demonstrate competitive or improved translation quality.
• Score: 67.76725267984578
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Entropic optimal transport (EOT) in continuous spaces with quadratic cost is a classical tool for solving the domain translation problem. In practice, recent approaches optimize a weak dual EOT objective depending on a single potential, but doing so is computationally not efficient due to the intractable log-partition term. Existing methods typically resolve this obstacle in one of two ways: by significantly restricting the transport family to obtain closed-form normalization (via Gaussian-mixture parameterizations), or by using general neural parameterizations that require simulation-based training procedures. We propose Variational Entropic Optimal Transport (VarEOT), based on an exact variational reformulation of the log-partition $\log \mathbb{E}[\exp(\cdot)]$ as a tractable minimization over an auxiliary positive normalizer. This yields a differentiable learning objective optimized with stochastic gradients and avoids the necessity of MCMC simulations during the training. We provide theoretical guarantees, including finite-sample generalization bounds and approximation results under universal function approximation. Experiments on synthetic data and unpaired image-to-image translation demonstrate competitive or improved translation quality, while comparisons within the solvers that use the same weak dual EOT objective support the benefit of the proposed optimization principle.

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