Unlocking Geodesic Gromov-Wasserstein Distances for 3D Modeling

Krzysztof Marcin Choromanski, Derek Long, Ananya Parashar, Dwaipayan Saha

\textit{Gromov-Wasserstein Distances} (GWDs) provide quantitative ways of comparing probabilistic distributions defined on different metric spaces by applying techniques from the optimal transport theory. As such, GWD can be potentially useful in a large variety of applications ranging from graph matching problems to 3D object detection. However its practical use at scale is significantly limited by cubic time complexity computations involving dense intra-space distance matrices. Even though in the Euclidean metric spaces several techniques (e.g. involving scalable kernel methods) were proposed to address it, to the best of our knowledge, analogous techniques for general geodesic distances on manifolds, or shortest-path distance on graphs in their discretized variants, were not developed. In this paper, we present \textbf{E}fficient \textbf{G}eodesic \textbf{Gro}mov-\textbf{W}asserstein methods (EGGroW), a new class of efficient algorithms designed to calculate geodesic Gromov-Wasserstein distances with entropic Sinkhorn-like approaches, leveraging recently introduced \textit{GenusSink} methods \citep{genussink} and the theory of random features. We provide important downstream…