Weak & singular flows

Let $\lambda (u,x)$ be the local Arnold multiplicity of a quasi-plurisubharmonic function $u$. Di Nezza–Guedj–Lu asked whether every maximal weak solution ${\phi }_t$ of the twisted Kähler–Ricci flow satisfies $\lambda ({\phi }_t,x)=\max \{\lambda ({\phi }_0,x)-t,0\}$. We give counterexamples on the Hirzebruch surface ${\mathbb{F}}_e={\mathbb{P}}_{{\mathbb{P}}^1}({\mathcal{O}}_{{\mathbb{P}}^1}\oplus {\mathcal{O}}_{{\mathbb{P}}^1}(-e))$, $e\ge 2$. Let $S$ be its negative section and $F_1,\dots ,F_k$ be distinct fibres. If $a,b_i>0$, ${\sum }_i{b}_i>ea$, and the initial current is $a[S]+{\sum }_i{b}_i[F_i]$, then $\lambda ({\phi }_t,x)=a-\min \{k/e,1\}t$ for $x\in S\setminus {\bigcup }_i{F}_i$ and $0<t<\min \{a,b_1,\dots ,b_k\}$. Thus the formula fails for $k<e$; the slower decay is forced by the Zariski negative part of the residual class. Under explicit SNC and positivity hypotheses, we also prove an exact surface formula for pure divisorial data. Consequences include nonlocality with fixed background data and explicit multiplier ideals. Products with smooth factors give counterexamples in every complex dimension $n\ge 2$.

Starting from a closed, orientable three-dimensional Riemannian manifold, we consider the completion of the associated singular Ricci flow with respect to a natural spacetime distance. We show that this completion admits canonical intrinsic metrics on its time-slices, defined by conjugate heat kernel measures, and that these time-slices arise as metric limits of the regular part of the flow. More precisely, for any $t_0>0$ and any connected component $Z_{t_0}^{\prime }$ of the time-slice $Z_{t_0}$ of the completion, we prove that $$(\overline{{\mathcal{R}}_t^{\prime }},d_{g_t})\underset{t\nearrow t_0}{\overset{\mathrm{Gromov}\text{-}\mathrm{Hausdorff}}{\to }}(Z_{t_0}^{\prime },d_{t_0}^Z),$$ where ${\mathcal{R}}_t^{\prime }$ is the corresponding connected component of the regular part and $\overline{{\mathcal{R}}_t^{\prime }}$ denotes its metric completion. In particular, this yields the Gromov-Hausdorff convergence at the first singular time for closed three-dimensional Ricci flows. We also establish a refined structure theory for the singular set of the completion. In particular, the singular set is horizontally parabolic $1$-rectifiable, and its time image has vanishing $1/2$-dimensional Hausdorff measure. Moreover, on each time-slice, the singular set has Minkowski dimension at most $1$. The proof relies on heat kernel estimates for singular Ricci flows and the generalization of the structure theory of noncollapsed Ricci flow limit spaces.

We present two characterizations of smooth compact Ricci flow solutions solely in terms of metrics and measures (one of them only works under positive scalar curvature along the flow); thus, provide weak formulations that are generalized to the singular setting in a straightforward manner. These formulations are achieved by weakly formulating super Ricci flows and imposing a saturation condition (solely in terms of metric and measure) to ensure the super Ricci flow inequality is an equality.

We present a synthetic notion of scalar curvature (and its integral) for Riemannian manifolds and metric measure spaces, defined in terms of the initial slope of a Gaussian (double) integral. We explicitly calculate the integral scalar curvature for Lipschitz gluings of smooth Riemannian manifolds and for cones. In dimension 2, the former coincides with the formula derived by Gauss-Bonnet, whereas the latter differs. The extension to the time-dependent case allows us to characterize Ricci flows as super Ricci flows with minimal integral curvature functional.

Given a compact Kähler manifold $X$ and a closed, positive $(1,1)$-current $T$ on $X$, we find sufficient conditions for $T$ to induce a metric structure $(X,d_T)$ which is the Gromov-Hausdorff limit of compact Kähler manifolds either in a "static" way or at time zero of smooth Kähler-Ricci flows. In dimension $1$ we extend works of T. Richard and M. Simon, showing that any oriented compact Alexandrov surface with bounded integral curvature and without cusp is the initial datum of a Kähler-Ricci flow.

We review different notions of synthetic Ricci flow that apply to time-dependent families of metric measure spaces and which are based on properties of the heat flow, ideas from optimal transport, and the asymptotic behaviour of volumes. Each notion equivalently characterises (weighted) Ricci flow for smooth families of weighted Riemannian manifolds. We discuss the features of the different notions on various examples.

Deep neural networks learn feature representations via complex geometric transformations of the input data manifold. Despite the models' empirical success across domains, our understanding of neural feature representations is still incomplete. In this work we investigate neural feature geometry through the lens of discrete geometry. Since the input data manifold is typically unobserved, we approximate it using geometric graphs that encode local similarity structure. We provide theoretical results on the evolution of these graphs during training, showing that nonlinear activations play a crucial role in shaping feature geometry in feedforward neural networks. Moreover, we discover that the geometric transformations resemble a discrete Ricci flow on these graphs, suggesting that neural feature geometry evolves analogous to Ricci flow. This connection is supported by experiments on over 20,000 feedforward neural networks trained on binary classification tasks across both synthetic and real-world datasets. We observe that the emergence of class separability corresponds to the emergence of community structure in the associated graph representations, which is known to relate to discrete Ricci flow dynamics. Building on these insights, we introduce a novel framework for locally evaluating geometric transformations through comparison with discrete Ricci flow dynamics. Our results suggest practical design principles, including a geometry-informed early-stopping heuristic and a criterion for selecting network depth.

Optimal transport plays a major role in the study of manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded below. Some results in this setting have been extended to super Ricci flows, revealing a unified approach to analysis on Ricci nonnegative manifolds and Ricci flows. However we observe that the monotonicity of Perelman's functionals ($\mathcal{F}$, $\mathcal{W}$, reduced volume), which hold true for Ricci flows and Ricci nonnegative manifolds, cannot be strictly generalized to super Ricci flows. In 2010 Buzano introduced a condition which still generalizes Ricci flows and Ricci nonnegative manifolds, and on which Perelman's monotonicities do hold. We provide characterizations of this condition using optimal transport and understand it heuristically as Ricci nonnegativity of the space-time. This interpretation is consistent with its equivalence to Ricci nonnegativity on Perelman's infinite dimensional manifold. More precisely, we prove that for smooth evolutions of Riemannian manifolds, this condition is equivalent to a Bochner inequality (resembling Perelman's Harnack inequality but for the forward heat flow), a gradient estimate for the heat flow, a Wasserstein contraction along the adjoint heat flow, the convexity of a modified entropy along Wasserstein geodesics, and an Evolutionary Variational Inequality (EVI). The optimal transport statements use Perelman's $L$ distance as cost, as first studied on Ricci flows by Topping and by Lott. We also consider dimensionally improved and weighted versions of these conditions. The dimensional Bochner inequality and all gradient estimates for the forward heat equation, along with the EVIs, appear to be new even for general Ricci flows, and are related to the Hamiltonian perspective on the $L$ distance. Most of our proofs do not use tensor calculus or Jacobi fields, suggesting the possibility of future extensions to more singular settings.

We establish a short-time existence theory for complete Ricci flows under scaling-invariant curvature bounds, starting from rotationally symmetric metrics on ${\mathbb{R}}^{n+1}$ that are noncollapsed at infinity, without assuming bounded curvature. As a consequence, we construct a complete Ricci flow solution coming out of a rotationally symmetric metric, which has a cone-like singularity at the origin and no minimal hypersphere centered at the origin, using an approximation method.

In this paper, we extend Perelman's $W$-entropy formula and the concavity of the Shannon entropy power from smooth Ricci flow to super Ricci flows on metric measure spaces. Moreover, we prove the Li-Yau-Hamilton-Perelman Harnack inequality on super Ricci flows. As a significant application, we prove the equivalence between the volume non-local collapsing property and the lower boundedness of the $W$-entropy on RCD$(0,N)$ spaces. Finally, we use the $W$-entropy to study the logarithmic Sobolev inequality with optimal constant on super Ricci flows on metric measure spaces.

We study two different natural notions of singular Kähler-Einstein metrics on normal complex varieties. In the setting of singular Ricci flat Kähler cone metrics that arise as non-collapsed limits of sequences of Kähler-Einstein metrics or Kähler-Ricci flows, we show that an a priori weaker notion is equivalent to the stronger one introduced by Eyssidieux-Guedj-Zeriahi, and in particular the underlying variety has log terminal singularities in this case. Our method applies to more general singular Kähler-Einstein spaces as well, assuming that they define RCD spaces.

We show the existence of a solution to the Ricci flow with a compact length space of bounded curvature, i.e., a space that has curvature bounded above and below in the sense of Alexandrov, as its initial condition. We show that this flow converges in the $C^{1,\alpha }$-sense to a $C^{1,\alpha }$-continuous Riemannian manifold which is isometric to the original metric space. Moreover, we prove that the flow is uniquely determined by the initial condition, up to isometry.

We study Perelman's W-entropy functional on finite-dimensional RCD spaces, a synthetic generalization of spaces with Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature bounded from below. We rigorously justify the formula for the time derivative of the W-entropy and derive its monotonicity and rigidity properties. Additionally, we establish bounds for solutions of the heat equation, which are of independent interest.

We develop different synthetic notions of Ricci flow in the setting of time-dependent metric measure spaces based on ideas from optimal transport. They are formulated in terms of dynamic convexity and local concavity of the entropy along Wasserstein geodesics on the one hand and in terms of global and short-time asymptotic transport cost estimates for the heat flow on the other hand. We show that these properties characterise smooth (weighted) Ricci flows. Further, we investigate the relation between the different notions in the non-smooth setting of time-dependent metric measure spaces.

In this paper we survey some results on Ricci flowing non-smooth initial data. Among other things, we give a non-exhaustive list of various weak initial data which can be evolved with the Ricci flow. We also survey results which show that various curvature lower bounds will, possibly up to a constant, be preserved, if we start with such possibly non-smooth initial data. Some proofs/proof sketches are given in certain cases. A list of some open problems related to these areas is given in the last section of the paper.

In this work, we study the short-time existence theory of Ricci-DeTurck flow starting from rough metrics which satisfy a Morrey-type integrability condition. Using the rough existence theory, we show the preservation and improvement of distributional scalar curvature lower bounds provided the singular set for such metrics is not too large. As an application, we use the Ricci flow smoothing to study the removable singularity for scalar curvature rigidity in the compact case under Morrey regularity conditions. Our result supplements those of Jiang-Sheng-Zhang.

Metric measure spaces with synthetic Ricci bounds have attracted great interest in recent years, accompanied by spectacular breakthroughs and deep new insights. In this survey, I will provide a brief introduction to the concept of lower Ricci bounds as introduced by Lott-Villani and myself, and illustrate some of its geometric, analytic and probabilistic consequences, among them Li-Yau estimates, coupling properties for Brownian motions, sharp functional and isoperimetric inequalities, rigidity results, and structural properties like rectifiability and rectifiability of the boundary. In particular, I will explain its crucial interplay with the heat flow and its link to the curvaturedimension condition formulated in functional-analytic terms by Bakry-Èmery. This equivalence between the Lagrangian and the Eulerian approach then will be further explored in various recent research directions: i) time-dependent Ricci bounds which provide a link to (super-) Ricci flows for singular spaces, ii) second order calculus, upper Ricci bounds, and transformation formulas, iii) distribution-valued Ricci bounds which e.g. allow singular effects of non-convex boundaries to be taken into account.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful tools for approximating the distribution of complex data. It is known that data passing through a trained DNN classifier undergoes a series of geometric and topological simplifications. While some progress has been made toward understanding these transformations in neural networks with smooth activation functions, an understanding in the more general setting of non-smooth activation functions, such as the rectified linear unit (ReLU), which tend to perform better, is required. Here we propose that the geometric transformations performed by DNNs during classification tasks have parallels to those expected under Hamilton's Ricci flow - a tool from differential geometry that evolves a manifold by smoothing its curvature, in order to identify its topology. To illustrate this idea, we present a computational framework to quantify the geometric changes that occur as data passes through successive layers of a DNN, and use this framework to motivate a notion of `global Ricci network flow' that can be used to assess a DNN's ability to disentangle complex data geometries to solve classification problems. By training more than $1,500$ DNN classifiers of different widths and depths on synthetic and real-world data, we show that the strength of global Ricci network flow-like behaviour correlates with accuracy for well-trained DNNs, independently of depth, width and data set. Our findings motivate the use of tools from differential and discrete geometry to the problem of explainability in deep learning.

Motivated by recent work of Deruelle-Schulze-Simon, we study complete weakly PIC1 Ricci flows with Euclidean volume growth coming out of metric cones. We show that such a Ricci flow must be an expanding gradient Ricci soliton, and as a consequence, any metric cone at infinity of a complete weakly PIC1 Kähler manifold with Euclidean volume growth is biholomorphic to complex Euclidean space in a canonical way.

We study $n$-dimensional Ricci flows with non-negative Ricci curvature where the curvature is pointwise controlled by the scalar curvature and bounded by $C/t$, starting at metric cones which are Reifenberg outside the tip. We show that any such flow behaves like a self-similar solution up to an exponential error in time. As an application, we show that smooth $n$-dimensional complete non-compact Riemannian manifolds which are uniformly PIC1-pinched, with positive asymptotic volume ratio, are Euclidean. This confirms a higher dimensional version of a conjecture of Hamilton and Lott under the assumption of non-collapsing. It also yields a new and more direct proof of the original conjecture of Hamilton and Lott in three dimensions.

We study the subsequential convergence of singular solutions to the Ricci flow with prescribed constant in space geodesic curvature on compact surfaces with boundary. Furthermore, we show that in the particular case of rotational symmetry, this convergence does not depend on the sign of the geodesic curvature of the boundary.

The aim of this paper is to study almost rigidity properties of super Ricci flow whose Muller quantity is non-negative. We conclude almost splitting and quantitative stratification theorems that have been established by Bamler for Ricci flow. As a byproduct, we obtain an almost constancy for a certain integral quantity concerning scalar curvature at an almost selfsimilar point, which is new even for Ricci flow.

We prove the existence and uniqueness of a weighted analogue of the Fefferman-Graham ambient metric for manifolds with density. We then show that this ambient metric forms the natural geometric framework for the singular Ricci flow: given a singular gradient Ricci flow spacetime in the Kleiner-Lott sense, we construct a unique global ambient half-space from it. We also prove the converse, that every global ambient space contains a singular gradient Ricci flow spacetime, thereby completing the correspondence. Our main application is the construction of infinite families of fully non-linear analogues of Perelman's $\mathcal{F}$ and $\mathcal{W}$ functionals. We extend Perelman's monotonicity result to these two families of functionals under several conditions, including for shrinking solitons and Einstein manifolds. We do so by constructing a "Ricci flow vector field" in the ambient space, which may be of independent research interest. We also prove that the weighted GJMS operators associated with the weighted ambient metric are formally self-adjoint, and that the associated weighted renormalized volume coefficients are variational.

Lai (2021) used singular Ricci flows, introduced by Kleiner and Lott (2017), to construct a nonnegative Ricci curvature Ricci flow $g(t)$ emerging from an arbitrary 3D complete noncompact Riemannian manifold $(M^3,g_0)$ which has nonnegative Ricci curvature. We show $g(t)$ is complete for positive times provided $g_0$ satisfies a volume ratio lower bound that approaches zero at spatial infinity. Our proof combines a pseudolocality result of Lai (2021) for singular flows, together with a pseudolocality result of Hochard (2016) and Simon and Topping (2022) for nonsingular flows. We also show that the construction of complete nonnegative complex sectional curvature flows by Cabezas-Rivas and Wilking (2015) can be adapted here to show $g(t)$ is complete for positive times provided $g_0$ is a compactly supported perturbation of a nonnegative sectional curvature metric on ${\mathbb{R}}^3$.