{"ID":2853425,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16506","arxiv_id":"2510.16506","title":"Free energy Wasserstein gradient flow and their particle counterparts: toy model, (degenerate) PL inequalities and exit times","abstract":"In finite dimension, the long-time and metastable behavior of a gradient flow perturbated by a small Brownian noise is well understood. A similar situation arises when a Wasserstein gradient flow over a space of probability measure is approximated by a system of mean-field interacting particles, but classical results do not apply in these infinite-dimensional settings. This work is concerned with the situation where the objective function of the optimization problem contains an entropic penalization, so that the particle system is a Langevin diffusion process. We consider a very simple class of models, for which the infinite-dimensional behavior is fully characterized by a finite-dimensional process. The goal is to have a flexible class of benchmarks to fix some objectives, conjectures and (counter-)examples for the general situation. Inspired by the systematic study of these toy models, one application is presented on the continuous Curie-Weiss model in a symmetric double-well potential. We show that, at the critical temperature, although the $N$-particle Gibbs measure does not satisfy a uniform-in-$N$ standard log-Sobolev inequality (the optimal constant growing like $\\sqrt{N}$), it does satisfy a more general Lojasiewicz inequality uniformly in $N$, inducing uniform polynomial long-time convergence rates, propagation of chaos at stationarity and uniformly in time, and creation of chaos.","short_abstract":"In finite dimension, the long-time and metastable behavior of a gradient flow perturbated by a small Brownian noise is well understood. A similar situation arises when a Wasserstein gradient flow over a space of probability measure is approximated by a system of mean-field interacting particles, but classical results d...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16506","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16506v1","authors":"[\"Pierre Monmarché\"]","published":"2025-10-18T13:46:56Z","proceeding":"math.PR","tasks":"[\"math.PR\",\"math.AP\",\"math.OC\"]","methods":"[\"Diffusion Model\"]","has_code":false}