Learning from samples: inverse problems over measures

We study inverse problems where an unknown potential is observed only through samples from the measure it induces by a convex variational principle.

Such problems arise in learning costs, energies, and dynamics from distributional data, but the associated forward solution map is typically nonlinear and implicit.

We show that its optimality gap nevertheless yields convex empirical objectives for finite-dimensional potential classes, and we introduce sharpened Fenchel--Young losses that add a data-dependent discrepancy inside the forward problem.

This keeps the estimator calibrated while improving the local geometry of the loss.

Our main stability theorem separates the inverse error analysis into measurement error, forward perturbation, and empirical curvature.

We instantiate this principle for inverse entropic unbalanced optimal transport and for inverse Jordan--Kinderlehrer--Otto (JKO) learning from independent snapshot samples, obtaining high-probability parameter recovery bounds.

JKO schemes discretize Wasserstein gradient flows through a sequence of variational problems over measures, making them a natural language for population dynamics observed through snapshots.

In this JKO case, the sharpened objective reduces to an unbalanced transport problem, which also clarifies the connection between variational gap losses and quadratic iJKO\(^\star\) surrogates.

Numerical experiments illustrate the conditioning effect of sharpening and its benefits for sparse inverse-gradient-flow recovery.