Please note that the list below only shows forthcoming events, which may not include regular events that have not yet been entered for the forthcoming term. Please see the past events page for a list of all seminar series that the department has on offer.

 

Past events in this series


Mon, 19 Oct 2026

15:30 - 16:30
L3

Strong and weak approximation of the Lévy-driven stochastic heat equation on the sphere

Verena Schwarz
((Mathematical Institute University of Oxford))
Abstract

In this talk, we study the numerical approximation of the stochastic heat equation on the sphere driven by an additive Lévy process. For this, we first prove new regularity results for the solution of the stochastic heat equation under different regularity assumptions on the initial value and driving Lévy process. In these settings, we perform a spectral approximation based on the truncation of the series expansion with respect to the real-valued spherical harmonic functions. Further, we apply a forward resp. backward Euler-Maruyama scheme for the temporal approximation. We prove strong and weak convergence rates for the introduced approximation scheme and present numerical simulations that confirm our theoretical results.

This is joint work with Annika Lang and Andrea Papini.

Mon, 26 Oct 2026

15:30 - 16:30
L3

Quantitative convergence of finite population approximations for mean field control problems

Mehdi Talbi
(University of Paris Cité)
Abstract

We study the approximation of mean field control problems by systems of interacting controlled particles, focusing on quantitative convergence rates for the associated value functions. We first establish non-asymptotic convergence bounds in discrete time, allowing for common noise and interactions through both states and controls. We then extend these results to path-dependent models, where the convergence rates reflect the increasing dimension of the discretized path space. Our approach relies on dynamic programming arguments combined with Wasserstein estimates for empirical measures of independent, not necessarily identically distributed random variables. In continuous time, we combine these estimates with uniform time-discretization bounds to obtain an explicit logarithmic convergence rate for path-dependent McKean–Vlasov control problems. Numerical experiments illustrate our theoretical results and highlight the influence of path dependence on convergence rates.

 
This is a joint work with Mathieu Laurière, NYU Shanghai.
Mon, 09 Nov 2026

15:30 - 16:30
L3

One-Step Generative Modeling via Wasserstein Gradient Flows

RenYuan XU
(Stanford University)
Abstract

Diffusion models and flow-based methods have achieved strong results in image generation, but often rely on costly iterative sampling. We introduce W-Flow, a framework that compresses a Wasserstein gradient flow into a one-step neural generator. By minimizing the Sinkhorn divergence, W-Flow transports a reference distribution toward the data distribution through efficient optimal-transport updates that capture global distributional discrepancies. We prove that, under suitable assumptions, the finite-sample training dynamics converge to the continuous-time distributional dynamics. Empirically, W-Flow sets a new state of the art in one-step ImageNet generation, with improved mode coverage and domain transfer. We will also discuss extensions using alternative energy functionals and applications to post-training.


 

Mon, 23 Nov 2026

15:30 - 16:30
L3

TBA

Fredrik Viklund
(KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
Abstract

TBA

Mon, 30 Nov 2026

15:30 - 16:30
L3

TBA

Kay Giesecke
(University of Potsdam)
Abstract

TBA