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1. Solving Sparse Linear Systems Faster than Matrix Multiplication

   https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611976465.31  

   Peng, Richard; Vempala, Santosh S. (January 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SODA 2021, Virtual Conference, January 10 - 13, 2021)

   null (Ed.)

   Can linear systems be solved faster than matrix multiplication? While there has been remarkable progress for the special cases of graph structured linear systems, in the general setting, the bit complexity of solving an $$n \times n$$ linear system $Ax=b$ is $$\tilde{O}(n^\omega)$$, where $$\omega < 2.372864$$ is the matrix multiplication exponent. Improving on this has been an open problem even for sparse linear systems with poly$(n)$ condition number. In this paper, we present an algorithm that solves linear systems in sparse matrices asymptotically faster than matrix multiplication for any $$\omega > 2$$. This speedup holds for any input matrix $$A$$ with $$o(n^{\omega -1}/\log(\kappa(A)))$$ non-zeros, where $$\kappa(A)$$ is the condition number of $$A$$. For poly$(n)$-conditioned matrices with $$\tilde{O}(n)$$ nonzeros, and the current value of $$\omega$$, the bit complexity of our algorithm to solve to within any $$1/\text{poly}(n)$$ error is $$O(n^{2.331645})$$. Our algorithm can be viewed as an efficient, randomized implementation of the block Krylov method via recursive low displacement rank factorizations. It is inspired by the algorithm of [Eberly et al. ISSAC `06 `07] for inverting matrices over finite fields. In our analysis of numerical stability, we develop matrix anti-concentration techniques to bound the smallest eigenvalue and the smallest gap in eigenvalues of semi-random matrices. 

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2. Straggler Robust Distributed Matrix Inverse Approximation

   Charalambides, Neophytos; Pilanci, Mert; Hero, Alfred (January 2020, IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop)

   null (Ed.)

   A cumbersome operation in numerical analysis and linear algebra, optimization, machine learning and engineering algorithms; is inverting large full-rank matrices which appears in various processes and applications [1]. This has both numerical stability and complexity issues, as well as high expected time to compute. We address the latter issue, by proposing an algorithm which uses a black-box least squares optimization solver as a subroutine, to give an estimate of the inverse (and pseudoinverse) of real nonsingular matrices; by estimating its columns. This also gives it the flexibility to be performed in a distributed manner, thus the estimate can be obtained a lot faster, and can be made robust to stragglers. Furthermore, we assume a centralized network with no message passing between the computing nodes, and do not require a matrix factorization; e.g. LU, SVD or QR decomposition beforehand. 

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3. Learning Fast Algorithms for Linear Transforms Using Butterfly Factorizations

   Dao, Tri; Gu, Albert; Eichhorn, Matthew; Rudra, Atri; Re, Christopher (June 2019, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   Fast linear transforms are ubiquitous in machine learning, including the discrete Fourier transform, discrete cosine transform, and other structured transformations such as convolutions. All of these transforms can be represented by dense matrix-vector multiplication, yet each has a specialized and highly efficient (subquadratic) algorithm. We ask to what extent hand-crafting these algorithms and implementations is necessary, what structural prior they encode, and how much knowledge is required to automatically learn a fast algorithm for a provided structured transform. Motivated by a characterization of fast matrix-vector multiplication as products of sparse matrices, we introduce a parameterization of divide-and-conquer methods that is capable of representing a large class of transforms. This generic formulation can automatically learn an efficient algorithm for many important transforms; for example, it recovers the O(N logN) Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm to machine precision, for dimensions N up to 1024. Furthermore, our method can be incorporated as a lightweight replacement of generic matrices in machine learning pipelines to learn efficient and compressible transformations. On a standard task of compressing a single hidden-layer network, our method exceeds the classification accuracy of unconstrained matrices on CIFAR-10 by 3.9 points—the first time a structured approach has done so—with 4X faster inference speed and 40X fewer parameters. 

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4. Addressing Irregular Patterns of Matrix Computations on GPUs and Their Impact on Applications Powered by Sparse Direct Solvers

   Abdelfattah, A.; Ghysels, P.; Boukaram, W.; Tomov, S.; Li, X.; Dongarra, J. (November 2022, International Conference for High Performance Computing Networking Storage and Analysis)

   Many scientific applications rely on sparse direct solvers for their numerical robustness. However, performance optimization for these solvers remains a challenging task, especially on GPUs. This is due to workloads of small dense matrices that are different in size. Matrix decompositions on such irregular workloads are rarely addressed on GPUs. This paper addresses irregular workloads of matrix computations on GPUs, and their application to accelerate sparse direct solvers. We design an interface for the basic matrix operations supporting problems of different sizes. The interface enables us to develop irrLU-GPU, an LU decomposition on matrices of different sizes. We demonstrate the impact of irrLU-GPU on sparse direct LU solvers using NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. Experimental results are shown for a sparse direct solver based on a multifrontal sparse LU decomposition applied to linear systems arising from the simulation, using finite element discretization on unstructured meshes, of a high-frequency indefinite Maxwell problem. 

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5. Structured matrix recovery from matrix‐vector products

   https://doi.org/10.1002/nla.2531  

   Halikias, Diana; Townsend, Alex (January 2024, Numerical Linear Algebra with Applications)

   Abstract Can one recover a matrix efficiently from only matrix‐vector products? If so, how many are needed? This article describes algorithms to recover matrices with known structures, such as tridiagonal, Toeplitz, Toeplitz‐like, and hierarchical low‐rank, from matrix‐vector products. In particular, we derive a randomized algorithm for recovering an unknown hierarchical low‐rank matrix from only matrix‐vector products with high probability, where is the rank of the off‐diagonal blocks, and is a small oversampling parameter. We do this by carefully constructing randomized input vectors for our matrix‐vector products that exploit the hierarchical structure of the matrix. While existing algorithms for hierarchical matrix recovery use a recursive “peeling” procedure based on elimination, our approach uses a recursive projection procedure. 

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