A Geometric View of Adaptive Cross Approximation via Exterior Algebra

Abstract

Adaptive cross approximation (ACA) constructs low-rank CUR approximations from selected rows and columns of a matrix, making it attractive when individual entries are inexpensive to query but forming or repeatedly multiplying by the full matrix is not. Its practical performance, however, is not well explained by existing worst-case bounds, which can be exponentially large and often fail to predict when greedy largest-entry pivoting performs poorly. By viewing the matrix as a cross-gram matrix, we reinterpret the classical determinantal formula for the CUR residual through the lens of exterior algebra. In this representation, each residual entry is a weighted inner product between two $(k+1)$-blades divided by the normalized volume of the pivot block. The formula separates three effects: the weighted magnitudes of singular-vector rows, their angular geometry, and the conditioning of the selected pivots. From this we recover a classical $σ_{k+1}$-type estimate, characterize when one pivot annihilates or nearly annihilates additional rows and columns, obtain a quasi-optimality estimate for positive-semidefinite matrices, and bound the rank-one update through an explicit angle-based formula. We use this framework to explain the failure of greedy ACA on an asymmetric spiral-kernel example and to motivate a geometry-aware weighted-mass pivoting rule for radial-basis Galerkin stiffness matrices. In the reported experiments, weighted-mass pivoting often reduces the Frobenius residual relative to greedy pivoting and randomly pivoted Cholesky while retaining comparable runtime on parallel hardware.