A Provably Convergent and Practical Algorithm for Gromov--Wasserstein Optimal Transport

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Liang, Ling, Yang, Lei
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866913091967516672
author Liang, Ling
Yang, Lei
author_facet Liang, Ling
Yang, Lei
contents Gromov--Wasserstein optimal transport (GWOT) aligns metric measure spaces by matching their within-domain relational structures, but large-scale GWOT remains challenging because its objective is nonconvex and projection onto the transport polytope is often solved only approximately in practice. This leads to a gap between practical projected-gradient implementations and convergence theory, which typically assumes exact projections. For squared-loss GWOT, we propose an inexact projected-gradient framework with a verifiable feasibility-residual-based inexact condition for the projection subproblem. This condition is directly computable and avoids unknown quantities such as the exact projection point. Under this implementable condition, we prove subsequential convergence to stationary points and, with a mild tolerance-decay condition, convergence of the whole sequence. The resulting method retains the simplicity and sparsity of projected-gradient schemes while providing rigorous convergence guarantees, turning projected-gradient methods into a principled and scalable approach for GWOT with provable reliability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_04175
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Provably Convergent and Practical Algorithm for Gromov--Wasserstein Optimal Transport
Liang, Ling
Yang, Lei
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
Gromov--Wasserstein optimal transport (GWOT) aligns metric measure spaces by matching their within-domain relational structures, but large-scale GWOT remains challenging because its objective is nonconvex and projection onto the transport polytope is often solved only approximately in practice. This leads to a gap between practical projected-gradient implementations and convergence theory, which typically assumes exact projections. For squared-loss GWOT, we propose an inexact projected-gradient framework with a verifiable feasibility-residual-based inexact condition for the projection subproblem. This condition is directly computable and avoids unknown quantities such as the exact projection point. Under this implementable condition, we prove subsequential convergence to stationary points and, with a mild tolerance-decay condition, convergence of the whole sequence. The resulting method retains the simplicity and sparsity of projected-gradient schemes while providing rigorous convergence guarantees, turning projected-gradient methods into a principled and scalable approach for GWOT with provable reliability.
title A Provably Convergent and Practical Algorithm for Gromov--Wasserstein Optimal Transport
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04175