arXiv subjects

Edgar Solomonik

Publications and source records attributed to Edgar Solomonik.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Linear Systems and Eigenvalue Problems: Open Questions from a Simons Workshop

This document presents a series of open questions arising in matrix computations, i.e., the numerical solution of linear algebra problems. It is a result of working groups at the workshop Linear Systems and Eigenvalue Problems, which was organized at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing program on Complexity and Linear Algebra in Fall 2025. The complexity and numerical solution of linear algebra problems is a crosscutting area between theoretical computer science and numerical analysis. The value of the particular problem formulations here is that they were produced via discussions between researchers from both groups. The open questions are organized in five categories: iterative solvers for linear systems, eigenvalue computation, low-rank approximation, randomized sketching, and other areas including tensors, quantum systems, and matrix functions. (Updated to reflect the status of the open problems as of August 20, 2026.)

math.NA↗

arXiv2025

Simulating Clifford Circuits with Gaussian Elimination

Quantum circuits are considered more powerful than classical circuits and require exponential resources to simulate classically. Clifford circuits are a special class of quantum circuits that can be simulated in polynomial time but still show important quantum effects such as entanglement. In this work, we present an algorithm that simulates Clifford circuits by performing Gaussian elimination on a modified adjacency matrix derived from the circuit structure. Our work builds on an ZX-calculus tensor network representation of Clifford circuits that reduces to quantum graph states. We give a concise formula of amplitudes of graph states based on the LDL decomposition of matrices over GF(2), and use it to get efficient algorithms for strong and weak simulation of Clifford circuits using tree-decomposition-based fast LDL algorithm. The complexity of our algorithm matches the state of art for weak graph state simulation and improves the state of art for strong graph state simulation by taking advantage of Strassen-like fast matrix multiplication. Our algorithm is also efficient when computing many amplitudes or samples of a Clifford circuit. Further, our amplitudes formula provides a new characterization of locally Clifford equivalent graph states as well as an efficient protocol to learn graph states with low-rank adjacency matrices.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Tensor Completion Algorithms for Highly Oscillatory Operators

This paper presents low-complexity tensor completion algorithms and their efficient implementation to reconstruct highly oscillatory operators discretized as $n\times n$ matrices. The underlying tensor decomposition is based on the reshaping of the input matrix and its butterfly decomposition into an order $O (\log n)$ tensor. The reshaping of the input matrix into a tensor allows for representation of the butterfly decomposition as a tensor decomposition with dense tensors. This leads to efficient utilization of the existing software infrastructure for dense and sparse tensor computations. We propose two tensor completion algorithms in the butterfly format, using alternating least squares and gradient-based optimization, as well as a novel strategy that uses low-rank matrix completion to efficiently generate an initial guess for the proposed algorithms. To demonstrate the efficiency and applicability of our proposed algorithms, we perform three numerical experiments using simulated oscillatory operators in seismic applications. In these experiments, we use $O (n \log n)$ observed entries in the input matrix and demonstrate an $O(n\log^3 n)$ computational cost of the proposed algorithms, leading to a speedup of orders of magnitudes per iteration for large matrices compared to the low-rank matrix and quantized tensor-train completion. Moreover, the proposed butterfly completion algorithms, equipped with the novel initial guess generation strategy, achieve reconstruction errors that are smaller by an order of magnitude, enabling accurate recovery of the underlying structure compared to the state-of-the-art completion algorithms.

math.NA↗

arXiv2025

Sparse LDL, LU, and inverse butterfly factorization via tree decomposition

While linear systems over general fields can be solved in matrix-multiplication time, the complexity of symmetric triangular factorization has received relatively little formal study. We give dense and sparse LDL algorithms for symmetric matrices over an arbitrary field. Both algorithms leverage pivoted (rank-revealing) LU on off-diagonal blocks of a saddle-point form of a general symmetric matrix. For an $n\times n$ matrix, this yields an $O(n^\omega)$ dense LDL algorithm, where $n\times n$ matrix multiplication is assumed to cost $O(n^\omega)$ with $\omega>2$. For sparse matrices whose graph has treewidth $\tau$, we provide an implicit LDL in $O(n\tau^{\omega-1})$ time, and an explicit LDL whenever the rank deficiency is $O(\tau)$. We give analogous results for sparse LU via a standard off-diagonal embedding. We also obtain bounds on work, storage, and parallel-depth in terms of the dense $\tau\times\tau$ kernels executed at each bag in a tree decomposition. Finally, in the full-rank bounded-treewidth setting, we prove that $A^{-1}$ has complementary low-rank structure and admits an exact butterfly factorization with rank $O(\tau)$.

math.NA↗

arXiv2024

Approximate Contraction of Arbitrary Tensor Networks with a Flexible and Efficient Density Matrix Algorithm

Tensor network contractions are widely used in statistical physics, quantum computing, and computer science. We introduce a method to efficiently approximate tensor network contractions using low-rank approximations, where each intermediate tensor generated during the contractions is approximated as a low-rank binary tree tensor network. The proposed algorithm has the flexibility to incorporate a large portion of the environment when performing low-rank approximations, which can lead to high accuracy for a given rank. Here, the environment refers to the remaining set of tensors in the network, and low-rank approximations with larger environments can generally provide higher accuracy. For contracting tensor networks defined on lattices, the proposed algorithm can be viewed as a generalization of the standard boundary-based algorithms. In addition, the algorithm includes a cost-efficient density matrix algorithm for approximating a tensor network with a general graph structure into a tree structure, whose computational cost is asymptotically upper-bounded by that of the standard algorithm that uses canonicalization. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique outperforms previously proposed approximate tensor network contraction algorithms for multiple problems in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Accelerating Galerkin Reduced-Order Models for Turbulent Flows with Tensor Decomposition

Galerkin-based reduced-order models (G-ROMs) offer efficient and accurate approximations for laminar flows but require hundreds to thousands of modes $N$ to capture the complex dynamics of turbulent flows. This makes standard G-ROMs computationally expensive due to the third-order advection tensor contraction, requiring the storage of $N^3$ entries and the computation of $2N^3$ operations per timestep. As a result, such ROMs are impractical for realistic applications like turbulent flow control. In this work, we consider problems that demand large $N$ values for accurate G-ROMs and propose a novel approach that accelerates G-ROMs by utilizing the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) tensor decomposition to approximate the advection tensor as a sum of $R$ rank-1 tensors. We also leverage the partial skew-symmetry property of the advection tensor and derive two conditions for the CP decomposition to preserve this property. Moreover, we investigate the low-rank structure of the advection tensor using singular value decomposition (SVD) and compare the performance of G-ROMs accelerated by CP (CPD-ROM) and SVD (SVD-ROM). Demonstrated on problems from 2D periodic to 3D turbulent flows, the CPD-ROM achieves at least a $10$-fold speedup and a $16.7$-fold reduction in nonlinear term evaluation costs compared to the standard G-ROM. The skew-symmetry preserving CPD-ROM demonstrates improved stability in both the reproduction and predictive regimes, and enables the use of smaller rank $R$. Singular value analysis reveals a persistent low-rank structure in the $H^1_0$-based advection tensor, and CP decomposition achieves at least an order of magnitude higher compression ratio than SVD.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2023

Optimizing Distributed Tensor Contractions using Node-Aware Processor Grids

We propose an algorithm that aims at minimizing the inter-node communication volume for distributed and memory-efficient tensor contraction schemes on modern multi-core compute nodes. The key idea is to define processor grids that optimize intra-/inter-node communication volume in the employed contraction algorithms. We present an implementation of the proposed node-aware communication algorithm into the Cyclops Tensor Framework (CTF). We demonstrate that this implementation achieves a significantly improved performance for matrix-matrix-multiplication and tensor-contractions on up to several hundreds modern compute nodes compared to conventional implementations without using node-aware processor grids. Our implementation shows good performance when compared with existing state-of-the-art parallel matrix multiplication libraries (COSMA and ScaLAPACK). In addition to the discussion of the performance for matrix-matrix-multiplication, we also investigate the performance of our node-aware communication algorithm for tensor contractions as they occur in quantum chemical coupled-cluster methods. To this end we employ a modified version of CTF in combination with a coupled-cluster code (Cc4s). Our findings show that the node-aware communication algorithm is also able to improve the performance of coupled-cluster theory calculations for real-world problems running on tens to hundreds of compute nodes.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Minimum Cost Loop Nests for Contraction of a Sparse Tensor with a Tensor Network

Sparse tensor decomposition and completion are common in numerous applications, ranging from machine learning to computational quantum chemistry. Typically, the main bottleneck in optimization of these models are contractions of a single large sparse tensor with a network of several dense matrices or tensors (SpTTN). Prior works on high-performance tensor decomposition and completion have focused on performance and scalability optimizations for specific SpTTN kernels. We present algorithms and a runtime system for identifying and executing the most efficient loop nest for any SpTTN kernel. We consider both enumeration of such loop nests for autotuning and efficient algorithms for finding the lowest cost loop-nest for simpler metrics, such as buffer size or cache miss models. Our runtime system identifies the best choice of loop nest without user guidance, and also provides a distributed-memory parallelization of SpTTN kernels. We evaluate our framework using both real-world and synthetic tensors. Our results demonstrate that our approach outperforms available generalized state-of-the-art libraries and matches the performance of specialized codes.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Efficient parallel implementation of the multiplicative weight update method for graph-based linear programs

Positive linear programs (LPs) model many graph and operations research problems. One can solve for a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation for positive LPs, for any selected $\epsilon$, in polylogarithmic depth and near-linear work via variations of the multiplicative weight update (MWU) method. Despite extensive theoretical work on these algorithms through the decades, their empirical performance is not well understood. In this work, we implement and test an efficient parallel algorithm for solving positive LP relaxations, and apply it to graph problems such as densest subgraph, bipartite matching, vertex cover and dominating set. We accelerate the algorithm via a new step size search heuristic. Our implementation uses sparse linear algebra optimization techniques such as fusion of vector operations and use of sparse format. Furthermore, we devise an implicit representation for graph incidence constraints. We demonstrate the parallel scalability with the use of threading OpenMP and MPI on the Stampede2 supercomputer. We compare this implementation with exact libraries and specialized libraries for the above problems in order to evaluate MWU's practical standing for both accuracy and performance among other methods. Our results show this implementation is faster than general purpose LP solvers (IBM CPLEX, Gurobi) in all of our experiments, and in some instances, outperforms state-of-the-art specialized parallel graph algorithms.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

Application Performance Modeling via Tensor Completion

Performance tuning, software/hardware co-design, and job scheduling are among the many tasks that rely on models to predict application performance. We propose and evaluate low-rank tensor decomposition for modeling application performance. We discretize the input and configuration domains of an application using regular grids. Application execution times mapped within grid-cells are averaged and represented by tensor elements. We show that low-rank canonical-polyadic (CP) tensor decomposition is effective in approximating these tensors. We further show that this decomposition enables accurate extrapolation of unobserved regions of an application's parameter space. We then employ tensor completion to optimize a CP decomposition given a sparse set of observed execution times. We consider alternative piecewise/grid-based models and supervised learning models for six applications and demonstrate that CP decomposition optimized using tensor completion offers higher prediction accuracy and memory-efficiency for high-dimensional performance modeling.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2022

Tensor Rank and Other Multipartite Entanglement Measures of Graph States

Graph states play an important role in quantum information theory through their connection to measurement-based computing and error correction. Prior work has revealed elegant connections between the graph structure of these states and their multipartite entanglement content. We continue this line of investigation by identifying additional entanglement properties for certain types of graph states. From the perspective of tensor theory, we tighten both upper and lower bounds on the tensor rank of odd ring states ($|R_{2n+1}\rangle$) to read $2^n+1 \leq rank(|R_{2n+1}\rangle) \leq 3*2^{n-1}$. Next, we show that several multipartite extensions of bipartite entanglement measures are dichotomous for graph states based on the connectivity of the corresponding graph. Lastly, we give a simple graph rule for computing the n-tangle $\tau_n$.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Cost-efficient Gaussian Tensor Network Embeddings for Tensor-structured Inputs

This work discusses tensor network embeddings, which are random matrices ($S$) with tensor network structure. These embeddings have been used to perform dimensionality reduction of tensor network structured inputs $x$ and accelerate applications such as tensor decomposition and kernel regression. Existing works have designed embeddings for inputs $x$ with specific structures, such that the computational cost for calculating $Sx$ is efficient. We provide a systematic way to design tensor network embeddings consisting of Gaussian random tensors, such that for inputs with more general tensor network structures, both the sketch size (row size of $S$) and the sketching computational cost are low. We analyze general tensor network embeddings that can be reduced to a sequence of sketching matrices. We provide a sufficient condition to quantify the accuracy of such embeddings and derive sketching asymptotic cost lower bounds using embeddings that satisfy this condition and have a sketch size lower than any input dimension. We then provide an algorithm to efficiently sketch input data using such embeddings. The sketch size of the embedding used in the algorithm has a linear dependence on the number of sketching dimensions of the input. Assuming tensor contractions are performed with classical dense matrix multiplication algorithms, this algorithm achieves asymptotic cost within a factor of $O(\sqrt{m})$ of our cost lower bound, where $m$ is the sketch size. Further, when each tensor in the input has a dimension that needs to be sketched, this algorithm yields the optimal sketching asymptotic cost. We apply our sketching analysis to inexact tensor decomposition optimization algorithms. We provide a sketching algorithm for CP decomposition that is asymptotically faster than existing work in multiple regimes, and show optimality of an existing algorithm for tensor train rounding.

math.NA↗

arXiv2022

Alternating Mahalanobis Distance Minimization for Stable and Accurate CP Decomposition

CP decomposition (CPD) is prevalent in chemometrics, signal processing, data mining and many more fields. While many algorithms have been proposed to compute the CPD, alternating least squares (ALS) remains one of the most widely used algorithm for computing the decomposition. Recent works have introduced the notion of eigenvalues and singular values of a tensor and explored applications of eigenvectors and singular vectors in areas like signal processing, data analytics and in various other fields. We introduce a new formulation for deriving singular values and vectors of a tensor by considering the critical points of a function different from what is used in the previous work. Computing these critical points in an alternating manner motivates an alternating optimization algorithm which corresponds to alternating least squares algorithm in the matrix case. However, for tensors with order greater than equal to $3$, it minimizes an objective function which is different from the commonly used least squares loss. Alternating optimization of this new objective leads to simple updates to the factor matrices with the same asymptotic computational cost as ALS. We show that a subsweep of this algorithm can achieve a superlinear convergence rate for exact CPD with known rank and verify it experimentally. We then view the algorithm as optimizing a Mahalanobis distance with respect to each factor with ground metric dependent on the other factors. This perspective allows us to generalize our approach to interpolate between updates corresponding to the ALS and the new algorithm to manage the tradeoff between stability and fitness of the decomposition. Our experimental results show that for approximating synthetic and real-world tensors, this algorithm and its variants converge to a better conditioned decomposition with comparable and sometimes better fitness as compared to the ALS algorithm.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Optimal Round and Sample-Size Complexity for Partitioning in Parallel Sorting

State-of-the-art parallel sorting algorithms for distributed-memory architectures are based on computing a balanced partitioning via sampling and histogramming. By finding samples that partition the sorted keys into evenly-sized chunks, these algorithms minimize the number of communication rounds required. Histogramming (computing positions of samples) guides sampling, enabling a decrease in the overall number of samples collected. We derive lower and upper bounds on the number of sampling/histogramming rounds required to compute a balanced partitioning. We improve on prior results to demonstrate that when using $p$ processors, $O(\log^* p)$ rounds with $O(p/\log^* p)$ samples per round suffice. We match that with a lower bound that shows that any algorithm with $O(p)$ samples per round requires at least $\Omega(\log^* p)$ rounds. Additionally, we prove the $\Omega(p \log p)$ samples lower bound for one round, thus proving that existing one round algorithms: sample sort, AMS sort and HSS have optimal sample size complexity. To derive the lower bound, we propose a hard randomized input distribution and apply classical results from the distribution theory of runs.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Parallel Minimum Spanning Forest Computation using Sparse Matrix Kernels

Formulations of graph algorithms using sparse linear algebra have yielded highly scalable distributed algorithms for problems such as connectivity and shortest path computation. We develop the first formulation of the Awerbuch-Shiloach parallel minimum spanning forest (MSF) algorithm using linear algebra primitives. We introduce a multilinear kernel that operates on an adjacency matrix and two vectors. This kernel updates graph vertices by simultaneously using information from both adjacent edges and vertices. In addition, we explore optimizations to accelerate the shortcutting step in the Awerbuch-Shiloach algorithm. We implement this MSF algorithm with Cyclops, a distributed-memory library for generalized sparse tensor algebra. We analyze the parallel scalability of our implementation on the Stampede2 supercomputer.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Communication lower bounds for nested bilinear algorithms via rank expansion of Kronecker products

We develop lower bounds on communication in the memory hierarchy or between processors for nested bilinear algorithms, such as Strassen's algorithm for matrix multiplication. We build on a previous framework that establishes communication lower bounds by use of the rank expansion, or the minimum rank of any fixed size subset of columns of a matrix, for each of the three matrices encoding a bilinear algorithm. This framework provides lower bounds for a class of dependency directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) corresponding to the execution of a given bilinear algorithm, in contrast to other approaches that yield bounds for specific DAGs. However, our lower bounds only apply to executions that do not compute the same DAG node multiple times. Two bilinear algorithms can be nested by taking Kronecker products between their encoding matrices. Our main result is a lower bound on the rank expansion of a matrix constructed by a Kronecker product derived from lower bounds on the rank expansion of the Kronecker product's operands. We apply the rank expansion lower bounds to obtain novel communication lower bounds for nested Toom-Cook convolution, Strassen's algorithm, and fast algorithms for contraction of partially symmetric tensors.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

ATD: Augmenting CP Tensor Decomposition by Self Supervision

Tensor decompositions are powerful tools for dimensionality reduction and feature interpretation of multidimensional data such as signals. Existing tensor decomposition objectives (e.g., Frobenius norm) are designed for fitting raw data under statistical assumptions, which may not align with downstream classification tasks. In practice, raw input tensors can contain irrelevant information while data augmentation techniques may be used to smooth out class-irrelevant noise in samples. This paper addresses the above challenges by proposing augmented tensor decomposition (ATD), which effectively incorporates data augmentations and self-supervised learning (SSL) to boost downstream classification. To address the non-convexity of the new augmented objective, we develop an iterative method that enables the optimization to follow an alternating least squares (ALS) fashion. We evaluate our proposed ATD on multiple datasets. It can achieve 0.8% - 2.5% accuracy gain over tensor-based baselines. Also, our ATD model shows comparable or better performance (e.g., up to 15% in accuracy) over self-supervised and autoencoder baselines while using less than 5% of learnable parameters of these baseline models

math.NA↗

arXiv2021

MTC: Multiresolution Tensor Completion from Partial and Coarse Observations

Existing tensor completion formulation mostly relies on partial observations from a single tensor. However, tensors extracted from real-world data are often more complex due to: (i) Partial observation: Only a small subset (e.g., 5%) of tensor elements are available. (ii) Coarse observation: Some tensor modes only present coarse and aggregated patterns (e.g., monthly summary instead of daily reports). In this paper, we are given a subset of the tensor and some aggregated/coarse observations (along one or more modes) and seek to recover the original fine-granular tensor with low-rank factorization. We formulate a coupled tensor completion problem and propose an efficient Multi-resolution Tensor Completion model (MTC) to solve the problem. Our MTC model explores tensor mode properties and leverages the hierarchy of resolutions to recursively initialize an optimization setup, and optimizes on the coupled system using alternating least squares. MTC ensures low computational and space complexity. We evaluate our model on two COVID-19 related spatio-temporal tensors. The experiments show that MTC could provide 65.20% and 75.79% percentage of fitness (PoF) in tensor completion with only 5% fine granular observations, which is 27.96% relative improvement over the best baseline. To evaluate the learned low-rank factors, we also design a tensor prediction task for daily and cumulative disease case predictions, where MTC achieves 50% in PoF and 30% relative improvements over the best baseline.

math.NA↗