English

Quantitative contraction rates for Sinkhorn's algorithm: beyond bounded costs and compact marginals

Probability 2026-05-01 v4 Optimization and Control

Abstract

We show non-asymptotic exponential convergence of Sinkhorn iterates to the Schr\"odinger potentials, solutions of the quadratic Entropic Optimal Transport problem on Rd\mathbb{R}^ d. Our results hold under mild assumptions on the marginal inputs: in particular, we only assume that they admit an asymptotically positive log-concavity profile, covering as special cases log-concave distributions and bounded smooth perturbations of quadratic potentials. Up to the authors' knowledge, these are the first results which establish exponential convergence of Sinkhorn's algorithm in a general setting without assuming bounded cost functions or compactly supported marginals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.04451,
  title  = {Quantitative contraction rates for Sinkhorn's algorithm: beyond bounded costs and compact marginals},
  author = {Giovanni Conforti and Alain Durmus and Giacomo Greco},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.04451},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

35 pages, final version accepted in Annals of Applied Probability