cuRegOT: A GPU-Accelerated Solver for Entropic-Regularized Optimal Transport

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Qiu, Yixuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915997470949376
author Qiu, Yixuan
author_facet Qiu, Yixuan
contents Optimal transport (OT) has emerged as a fundamental tool in modern machine learning, yet its computational cost remains a significant bottleneck for large-scale applications. While harnessing the massive parallelism of modern GPU hardware is critical for efficiency, the de facto standard Sinkhorn algorithm, despite its ease of parallelization, often suffers from slow convergence in challenging problems. More recently, the sparse-plus-low-rank quasi-Newton method offers a balance between convergence rate and per-iteration complexity; however, its efficiency on GPUs is severely hindered by the serial nature of sparse matrix symbolic analysis and irregular memory access patterns. To bridge this gap, we present cuRegOT, a high-performance GPU solver tailored for entropic-regularized OT. We introduce a suite of algorithmic and architectural optimizations, including an amortized symbolic analysis strategy to mitigate CPU bottlenecks, an asynchronous Sinkhorn iterates generation mechanism, and a fused kernel for bandwidth-efficient gradient evaluation. These strategies are backed by rigorous theoretical guarantees ensuring algorithmic convergence. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that cuRegOT achieves significant speedups over state-of-the-art GPU-based solvers across a variety of benchmark tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08793
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle cuRegOT: A GPU-Accelerated Solver for Entropic-Regularized Optimal Transport
Qiu, Yixuan
Mathematical Software
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Computation
Optimal transport (OT) has emerged as a fundamental tool in modern machine learning, yet its computational cost remains a significant bottleneck for large-scale applications. While harnessing the massive parallelism of modern GPU hardware is critical for efficiency, the de facto standard Sinkhorn algorithm, despite its ease of parallelization, often suffers from slow convergence in challenging problems. More recently, the sparse-plus-low-rank quasi-Newton method offers a balance between convergence rate and per-iteration complexity; however, its efficiency on GPUs is severely hindered by the serial nature of sparse matrix symbolic analysis and irregular memory access patterns. To bridge this gap, we present cuRegOT, a high-performance GPU solver tailored for entropic-regularized OT. We introduce a suite of algorithmic and architectural optimizations, including an amortized symbolic analysis strategy to mitigate CPU bottlenecks, an asynchronous Sinkhorn iterates generation mechanism, and a fused kernel for bandwidth-efficient gradient evaluation. These strategies are backed by rigorous theoretical guarantees ensuring algorithmic convergence. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that cuRegOT achieves significant speedups over state-of-the-art GPU-based solvers across a variety of benchmark tasks.
title cuRegOT: A GPU-Accelerated Solver for Entropic-Regularized Optimal Transport
topic Mathematical Software
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08793