Théo Lacombe

Selected Publications

1. M. Carrière, M. Theveneau, TL. Diffeomorphic interpolation for efficient persistence-based topological optimization. NeurIPS 2024.
2. T. Dumont, TL, FX. Vialard On The Existence Of Monge Maps For The Gromov-Wasserstein Problem. Foundation of Computational Mathematics, 2024.
3. TL. An Homogeneous Unbalanced Regularized Optimal Transport model with applications to Optimal Transport with Boundary, AISTATS 2023. Code.
4. J.Leygonie, M.Carrière, TL, S.Oudot. A Gradient Sampling Algorithm for Stratified Maps with Applications to Topological Data Analysis, Mathematical Programming, 2023.
5. V. Divol, TL. Estimation and Quantization of Expected Persistence Diagrams, ICML 2021.
6. M. Carriere, F. Chazal, Y. Ike, TL, M. Royer, Y. Umeda. PersLay: A Neural Network Layer for Persistence Diagrams and New Graph Topological Signatures, AISTATS 2020.
7. V. Divol, TL. Understanding the Topology and the Geometry of the Space of Persistence Diagrams via Optimal Partial Transport, Journal of Applied and Computational Topology.
8. TL, M. Cuturi, S. Oudot. Large Scale Computation of Means and Clusters for Persistence Diagrams using Optimal Transport, NeurIPS 2018.

Full list.

Software

I contribute to the Python API of the GUDHI library, where I release tools to deal with persistence diagrams (PDs) using Optimal Transport based on algorithms developed by the OT community, adapted to PDs.

Supervision

Ph.D. students

• (Sept 2025-) Mathis Hardion, co-supervised with François-Xavier Vialard.
• (Oct 2025-) Sinh Le Nhat, co-supervised with Miguel Martinez.
• (Sept 2023-) Théo Dumont, Ph.D. Co-supervised with François-Xavier Vialard and Virginie Ehrlacher.

Interns

• (2022) Maxime Guigon, École polytechnique, master internship.
• (2022) Théo Dumont, École des Mines de Paris, master internship.
• (2023) Marc Theveneau, École polytechnique, master internship (supervised with Mathieu Carrière).
• (2024) Tung Nguyen, Université Gustave Eiffel (Labex Bézout), master internship.
• (2025) Marc Janthial, École polytechnique, master internship (supervised with Clément Bonet).
• (2025) Kazeto Fukasawa, École polytechnique, master internship (supervised with Mathieu Carrière).
• (2025) Guillermo Aguilera, Université Gustave Eiffel (Labex Bézout), master internship.

Some Material

• I wrote a TDA tutorial. An html preview is available here, and you can download a zip archive here. This material was produced for the AMS-MRC week I co-organized.
• My Ph.D. thesis manuscript can be found here. You can find the corresponding slides there, and a video recording of the defense itself there.

Reviewer activity in conferences and journals

I usually review for main conferences in ML (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS) and computational geometry (SoCG), along with journals on that fields and more broadly in applied mathematics (FoCM, JMLR, Mathematical Programming, JACT, etc.). I was area chair for ATMCS 2025.