English

Fisher information regularization schemes for Wasserstein gradient flows

Numerical Analysis 2020-07-15 v2 Numerical Analysis

Abstract

We propose a variational scheme for computing Wasserstein gradient flows. The scheme builds upon the Jordan--Kinderlehrer--Otto framework with the Benamou-Brenier's dynamic formulation of the quadratic Wasserstein metric and adds a regularization by the Fisher information. This regularization can be derived in terms of energy splitting and is closely related to the Schr{\"o}dinger bridge problem. It improves the convexity of the variational problem and automatically preserves the non-negativity of the solution. As a result, it allows us to apply sequential quadratic programming to solve the sub-optimization problem. We further save the computational cost by showing that no additional time interpolation is needed in the underlying dynamic formulation of the Wasserstein-2 metric, and therefore, the dimension of the problem is vastly reduced. Several numerical examples, including porous media equation, nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation, aggregation diffusion equation, and Derrida-Lebowitz-Speer-Spohn equation, are provided. These examples demonstrate the simplicity and stableness of the proposed scheme.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.02152,
  title  = {Fisher information regularization schemes for Wasserstein gradient flows},
  author = {Wuchen Li and Jianfeng Lu and Li Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.02152},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:11:46.381Z