Abstract
We introduce a novel discretization scheme for Wasserstein gradient flows that involves successively computing Schrödinger bridges with the same marginals. This is different from both the forward/geodesic approximation and the backward/Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) approximations. The proposed scheme has two advantages- one, it avoids the use of the score function, and, two, it is amenable to particle-based approximations using the Sinkhorn algorithm. Our proof hinges upon showing that relative entropy between the Schrödinger bridge with the same marginals at temperature $\varepsilon$ and the joint distribution of a stationary Langevin diffusion at times zero and $\varepsilon$ is of the order $o(\varepsilon^2)$ with an explicit dependence given by Fisher information. Owing to this inequality, we can show, using a triangular approximation argument, that the interpolated iterated application of the Schrödinger bridge approximation converge to the Wasserstein gradient flow, for a class of gradient flows, including the heat flow. The results also provide a probabilistic and rigorous framework for the convergence of the self-attention mechanisms in transformer networks to the solutions of heat flows, first observed in the inspiring work SABP22 in machine learning research.
