Title: Revisiting Tree-Sliced Wasserstein Distance Through the Lens of the Fermat–Weber Problem
Primary area: learning on graphs and other geometries & topologies
Keywords: sliced optimal transport, tree-sliced wasserstein distance, tree wasserstein distance, fermat-weber problem

Abstract: Tree-Sliced methods have emerged as an efficient and expressive alternative to the traditional Sliced Wasserstein distance, replacing one-dimensional projections with tree-structured metric spaces and leveraging a splitting mechanism to better capture the underlying topological structure of integration domains while maintaining low computational cost. At the core of this framework is the Tree-Sliced Wasserstein (TSW) distance, defined over probability measures in Euclidean spaces, along with several variants designed to enhance its performance. A fundamental distinction between SW and TSW lies in their sampling strategies—a component explored in the context of SW but often overlooked in comparisons. This omission is significant: whereas SW relies exclusively on directional projections, TSW incorporates both directional and positional information through its tree-based construction. This enhanced spatial sensitivity enables TSW to reflect the geometric structure of the underlying data more accurately. Building on this insight, we propose a novel variant of TSW that explicitly leverages positional information in its design. Inspired by the classical Fermat–Weber problem—which seeks a point minimizing the sum of distances to a given set of points—we introduce the Fermat–Weber Tree-Sliced Wasserstein (FW-TSW) distance. By incorporating geometric median principles into the tree construction process, FW-TSW notably further improves the performance of TSW while preserving its low computational cost. These improvements are empirically validated across diverse experiments, including diffusion model training and gradient flow.

TL;DR: We propose a new variant of Tree-Sliced Wasserstein distance that incorporates positional data more explicitly, inspired by the Fermat–Weber problem.