Optimal transport (OT) and the related Wasserstein metric (W) are powerful and ubiquitous tools for comparing distributions. However, computing pairwise Wasserstein distances rapidly becomes intractable as cohort size grows. An attractive alternative would be to find an embedding space in which pairwise Euclidean distances map to OT distances, akin to standard multidimensional scaling (MDS). We present Wasserstein Wormhole, a transformer-based autoencoder that embeds empirical distributions into a latent space wherein Euclidean distances approximate OT distances. Extending MDS theory, we show that our objective function implies a bound on the error incurred when embedding non-Euclidean distances. Empirically, distances between Wormhole embeddings closely match Wasserstein distances, enabling linear time computation of OT distances. Along with an encoder that maps distributions to embeddings, Wasserstein Wormhole includes a decoder that maps embeddings back to distributions, allowing for operations in the embedding space to generalize to OT spaces, such as Wasserstein barycenter estimation and OT interpolation. By lending scalability and interpretability to OT approaches, Wasserstein Wormhole unlocks new avenues for data analysis in the fields of computational geometry and single-cell biology.

通过将经验分布嵌入到潜在空间中，使欧式距离近似于最优输运距离，Wasserstein Wormhole提供了一种可扩展且可解释的方法，用于计算最优输运距离，并在计算几何学和单细胞生物学领域的数据分析中开辟了新的研究方向。

Wasserstein虫洞：基于Transformer的可扩展最优传输距离