Preservation of Log-Concavity and Convergence of Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao Gradient Flows
stat.ML, cs.LG, math.PR
Submitted: 2026-09-16
Updated: 2026-09-16
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We study the convergence of Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao (WFR) gradient flows for sampling from probability distributions known up to a normalisation constant.
Terminology
Abstract
We study the convergence of Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao (WFR) gradient flows for sampling from probability distributions known up to a normalisation constant. By combining Wasserstein transport with Fisher-Rao birth-death dynamics, WFR flows balance exploration and selection. These flows have been recognised as a promising mechanism to accelerate convergence beyond Langevin dynamics. We show that for a class of strongly log-concave target distributions satisfying additional curvature conditions, WFR flows preserve strong log-concavity, in contrast to Wasserstein flows which enjoy this property only in the Gaussian setting. Exploiting this result, we derive explicit non-asymptotic convergence rates for the symmetrised Kullback-Leibler divergence, without requiring a warm-start as required in current estimates. In particular, we show that the convergence rate decomposes additively into Wasserstein and Fisher-Rao contributions, thereby confirming a recent conjecture within this setting. These results provide refined convergence guarantees and further develop the theoretical foundations of WFR gradient flows for sampling and Bayesian inference.
Sources
- A probabilistic interpretation of replicator-mutator dynamics
- Sequential Monte Carlo approximations of Wasserstein--Fisher--Rao gradient flows
- A note on the unique properties of the Kullback--Leibler divergence for sampling via gradient flows
- An operator splitting analysis of Wasserstein--Fisher--Rao gradient flows
- Gradient Flows in Filtering and Fisher-Rao Geometry
- Accelerating Langevin Sampling with Birth-death
- Stein transport for Bayesian inference
- Measure transport with kernel mean embeddings
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