Wasserstein Gradient Flows for Moreau Envelopes of f-Divergences in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces

Commonly used $f$-divergences of measures, e.g., the Kullback-Leibler divergence, are subject to limitations regarding the support of the involved measures. A remedy is regularizing the $f$-divergence by a squared maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) associated with a characteristic kernel $K$. We use the kernel mean embedding to show that this regularization can be rewritten as the Moreau envelope of some function on the associated reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Then, we exploit well-known results on Moreau envelopes in Hilbert spaces to analyze the MMD-regularized $f$-divergences, particularly their gradients. Subsequently, we use our findings to analyze Wasserstein gradient flows of MMD-regularized $f$-divergences. We provide proof-of-the-concept numerical examples for flows starting from empirical measures. Here, we cover $f$-divergences with infinite and finite recession constants. Lastly, we extend our results to the tight variational formulation of $f$-divergences and numerically compare the resulting flows.

@article{stein2025_2402.04613,
  title={ Wasserstein Gradient Flows for Moreau Envelopes of f-Divergences in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces },
  author={ Viktor Stein and Sebastian Neumayer and Nicolaj Rux and Gabriele Steidl },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.04613},
  year={ 2025 }
}