  We study first-order optimization algorithms for computing the barycenter of
Gaussian distributions with respect to the optimal transport metric. Although
the objective is geodesically non-convex, Riemannian GD empirically converges
rapidly, in fact faster than off-the-shelf methods such as Euclidean GD and SDP
solvers. This stands in stark contrast to the best-known theoretical results
for Riemannian GD, which depend exponentially on the dimension. In this work,
we prove new geodesic convexity results which provide stronger control of the
iterates, yielding a dimension-free convergence rate. Our techniques also
enable the analysis of two related notions of averaging, the
entropically-regularized barycenter and the geometric median, providing the
first convergence guarantees for Riemannian GD for these problems.
