Hellinger--Kantorovich gradient flows: Global exponential decay of entropy functionals

Abstract

We investigate a family of gradient flows of positive and probability measures, focusing on the Hellinger--Kantorovich (HK) geometry, which unifies transport mechanism of Otto--Wasserstein, and the birth-death mechanism of Hellinger (or Fisher--Rao). A central contribution is a complete characterization of global exponential decay behaviors of entropy functionals under Otto--Wasserstein and Hellinger-type gradient flows. In particular, for the more challenging analysis of HK gradient flows on positive measures---where the typical log-Sobolev arguments fail---we develop a specialized shape-mass decomposition that enables new analysis results. Our approach also leverages the Polyak--Łojasiewicz-type functional inequalities and a careful extension of classical dissipation estimates. These findings provide a unified and complete theoretical framework for gradient flows and underpin applications in computational algorithms for statistical inference, optimization, and machine learning.