Multi-Marginal Schrödinger Bridge Matching

TMLR Paper6246 Authors

Abstract: Understanding the continuous evolution of populations from discrete temporal snapshots is a critical research challenge, particularly in fields like developmental biology and systems medicine where longitudinal tracking of individual entities is often impossible. Such trajectory inference is vital for unraveling the mechanisms of dynamic processes. While Schrödinger Bridge (SB) offer a potent framework, their traditional application to pairwise time points can be insufficient for systems defined by multiple intermediate snapshots. This paper introduces Multi-Marginal Schrödinger Bridge Matching (MSBM), a novel algorithm specifically designed for the multi-marginal SB problem. MSBM extends iterative Markovian fitting (IMF) to effectively handle multiple marginal constraints. This technique ensures robust enforcement of all intermediate marginals while preserving the continuity of the learned global dynamics across the entire trajectory. Empirical validations on synthetic data and real-world single-cell RNA sequencing datasets demonstrate the competitive or superior performance of MSBM in capturing complex trajectories and respecting intermediate distributions, all with notable computational efficiency.

Submission Type: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Arno_Solin1

Submission Number: 6246