Mini-batch optimal transport (m-OT) has been successfully used in practical applications that involve probability measures with intractable density, or probability measures with a very high number of supports. The m-OT solves several sparser optimal transport problems and then returns the average of their costs and transportation plans. Despite its scalability advantage, m-OT is not a proper metric between probability measures since it does not satisfy the identity property. To address this problem, we propose a novel mini-batching scheme for optimal transport, named Batch of Mini-batches Optimal Transport (BoMb-OT), that can be formulated as a well-defined distance on the space of probability measures. Furthermore, we show that the m-OT is a limit of the entropic regularized version of the proposed BoMb-OT when the regularized parameter goes to infinity. We carry out extensive experiments to show that the new mini-batching scheme can estimate a better transportation plan between two original measures than m-OT. It leads to a favorable performance of BoMb-OT in the matching and color transfer tasks. Furthermore, we observe that BoMb-OT also provides a better objective loss than m-OT for doing approximate Bayesian computation, estimating parameters of interest in parametric generative models, and learning non-parametric generative models with gradient flow.

我们提出了一种新的小批量最优输运方法Batch of Mini-batches Optimal Transport（BoMb-OT），它把小批量之间的最优耦合考虑在内，可以看作是在概率测度空间上定义的有效距离的逼近，通过实验表明，BoMb-OT可以广泛应用于各种应用中，包括深层生成模型，深层领域适应，近似贝叶斯计算，颜色转换和渐变流，并在各种应用中表现良好。

小批量数据的传输：一种层次式方法