Gradient-Enhanced Proximal Algorithms for Mean Field Planning on Surfaces
Mean field planning on a surface prescribes initial and terminal densities and minimizes a transport energy subject to the continuity equation. Proximal algorithms for this problem repeatedly solve a time--space Poisson equation, whose temporal derivative and surface gradient determine the density and momentum corrections. We study a gradient-enhanced approximation of this constraint projection using finite differences in time, surface finite elements in space, temporal polynomial preserving recovery, and spatial parametric polynomial preserving recovery. The same construction is incorporated into ISTA, FISTA, and Douglas--Rachford splitting. We distinguish the recovered update from an exact discrete projection and derive residual identities and conditional finite-iteration perturbation bounds that retain data, boundary, and linear-solver errors. Existing derivative-recovery estimates identify a higher-order contribution under suitable regularity and mesh assumptions; they do not by themselves establish convergence of the outer optimization iteration. Available numerical illustrations on the sphere and a more complicated algebraic surface are discussed together with the limits of the recorded refinement data.