In this paper we consider bilinear sparse forms intimately related to iterated commutators of a rather general class of operators. We establish Bloom weighted estimates for these forms in the full range of exponents, both in the diagonal and off-diagonal cases. As an application, we obtain new Bloom bounds for commutators of (maximal) rough homogeneous singular integrals and the Bochner–Riesz operator at the critical index. We also raise the question about the sharpness of our estimates. In particular we obtain the surprising fact that even in the case of Calderón–Zygmund operators, the previously known quantitative Bloom bounds are not sharp for the second and higher order commutators.

We obtain a sparse domination principle for an arbitrary family of functions Formula Presented, where Formula Presented and Q is a cube in Formula Presented. When applied to operators, this result recovers our recent works [37, 39]. On the other hand, our sparse domination principle can be also applied to non-operator objects. In particular, we show applications to generalised Poincaré-Sobolev inequalities, tent spaces and general dyadic sums. Moreover, the flexibility of our result allows us to treat operators that are not localisable in the sense of [39], as we will demonstrate in an application to vector-valued square functions.