JKO schemes with general transport costs
We modify the JKO scheme, which is a time discretization of the Wasserstein gradient flow, by replacing the Wasserstein distance with more general transport costs on manifolds. We show when the cost function has a mixed Hessian which defines a Riemannian metric, our modified JKO scheme converges, under suitable conditions, to the corresponding Riemannian Fokker-Planck equation. Thus on a Riemannian manifold one may replace the (squared) Riemannian distance with any cost function which induces the metric. Of interest is when the Riemannian distance is computationally intractable, but a suitable cost has a simple analytic expression. We consider the Fokker-Planck equation on compact submanifolds with the Neumann boundary condition and on complete Riemannian manifolds with a finite drift condition. As an application we consider Hessian manifolds, taking as a cost the Bregman divergence.
Authors
- Ting‐Kam Leonard Wong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5254-7305)
- Cale Rankin
Institutions
- University of Toronto (CA)
- Monash University (AU)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Calculus of Variations and Partial Differential Equations
- Published
- 2026-02-17
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s00526-026-03256-x
- Primary Topic
- Geometric Analysis and Curvature Flows
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada