Learning to Generate Wasserstein Barycenters

Abstract

Optimal transport is a notoriously difficult problem to solve numerically, with current approaches often remaining intractable for very large-scale applications such as those encountered in machine learning. Wasserstein barycenters—the problem of finding measures in-between given input measures in the optimal transport sense—are even more computationally demanding as it requires to solve an optimization problem involving optimal transport distances. By training a deep convolutional neural network, we improve by a factor of 80 the computational speed of Wasserstein barycenters over the fastest state-of-the-art approach on the GPU, resulting in milliseconds computational times on $$512\times 512$$ regular grids. We show that our network, trained on Wasserstein barycenters of pairs of measures, generalizes well to the problem of finding Wasserstein barycenters of more than two measures. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach for computing barycenters of sketches and transferring colors between multiple images.