Sliced-Wasserstein Distances and Flows on Cartan-Hadamard Manifolds

While many Machine Learning methods have been developed or transposed on Riemannian manifolds to tackle data with known non-Euclidean geometry, Optimal Transport (OT) methods on such spaces have not received much attention. The main OT tool on these spaces is the Wasserstein distance, which suffers from a heavy computational burden. On Euclidean spaces, a popular alternative is the Sliced-Wasserstein distance, which leverages a closed-form solution of the Wasserstein distance in one dimension, but which is not readily available on manifolds. In this work, we derive general constructions of Sliced-Wasserstein distances on Cartan-Hadamard manifolds, Riemannian manifolds with non-positive curvature, which include among others Hyperbolic spaces or the space of Symmetric Positive Definite matrices. Then, we propose different applications such as classification of documents with a suitably learned ground cost on a manifold, and data set comparison on a product manifold. Additionally, we derive non-parametric schemes to minimize these new distances by approximating their Wasserstein gradient flows. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] © JMLR 2025. (edit, beta)