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Katherine J. Pearce

Publications and source records attributed to Katherine J. Pearce.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Blind error estimation for CUR approximation

Low-rank approximation is a fundamental tool for scalable matrix computations. While such approximations have classically been formed via the truncated SVD, recent advances in randomized numerical linear algebra have produced methods of comparable accuracy at a fraction of the cost. A key advantage of these approaches is their ability to operate with limited access to the full matrix. A prominent example is the CUR decomposition, which builds an approximation from only a subset of columns and rows, making it particularly well-suited to settings where global matrix access is unavailable, such as in the design of spectro-microscopy experiments where even matrix-vector products cannot be computed. However, the randomness inherent to these methods introduces a key challenge: efficiently assessing approximation accuracy under the stringent constraint that only a subset of matrix entries can be observed. We derive a "blind" estimator of the Frobenius error of a CUR decomposition. For this estimator, we derive a worst-case lower bound on the number of required column queries, and provide techniques for quantifying its uncertainty. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of the estimator and the uncertainty sets on a mix of synthetic problems and real spectro-microscopy examples.

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arXiv2026

Attention Mechanisms Through the Lens of Numerical Methods: Approximation Methods and Alternative Formulations

The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work aimed at accelerating attention through approximation and reformulation. In this survey, we revisit attention mechanisms through the lens of numerical analysis, with a particular emphasis on tools and perspectives from numerical linear algebra. Our goal is twofold: first, we aim to systematically review and classify fast approximation methods according to the numerical principles they exploit. These include sparsity and clustering approaches, low-rank and subspace projection techniques, randomized sketching methods, and tensor-based decompositions. We also discuss kernel-inspired reformulations of attention and recent architectural variants, such as Latent Attention, that modify the standard softmax formulation to improve efficiency. Second, by presenting these developments within a unified mathematical framework, we aim to bridge the gap between disciplines and highlight opportunities for further contributions from computational mathematics, particularly numerical linear algebra, to the design of scalable attention mechanisms.

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arXiv2026

Efficient error estimators for Generalized Nyström

Randomized algorithms in numerical linear algebra have proven to be effective in ameliorating issues of scalability when working with large matrices, efficiently producing accurate low-rank approximations. A key remaining challenge, however, is to efficiently assess the approximation accuracy of randomized methods without additional expensive matrix accesses. Recent work has addressed this issue by deriving fast leave-one-out error estimators for the randomized SVD and Nyström decomposition, enabling accurate error estimation with no additional matrix accesses. In this work, we extend the leave-one-out framework to the generalized Nyström decomposition, an approach that can be applied to general rectangular matrices. We do this by deriving three new leave-one-out error estimators and validating their effectiveness through numerical experiments.

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arXiv2025

Randomized Algorithms for Low-Rank Matrix and Tensor Decompositions

This paper surveys randomized algorithms in numerical linear algebra for low-rank decompositions of matrices and tensors. The survey begins with a review of classical matrix algorithms that can be accelerated by randomized dimensionality reduction, such as the singular value decomposition (SVD) or interpolative (ID) and CUR decompositions. Recent advances in randomized dimensionality reduction are discussed, including new methods of fast matrix sketching and sampling techniques, which are incorporated into classical matrix algorithms for fast low-rank matrix approximations. The extension of randomized matrix algorithms to tensors is then explored for several low-rank tensor decompositions in the CP and Tucker formats, including the higher-order SVD, ID, and CUR decomposition.

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arXiv2025

Randomized Block Low-Rank Matrix Compression by Tagging

In this work, we present randomized compression algorithms for flat rank-structured matrices with shared bases, termed uniform Block Low-Rank (BLR) matrices. Our main contribution is a technique called tagging, which improves upon the efficiency of existing algorithms for basis matrix computation while preserving accuracy. Tagging operates on the matrix using matrix-vector products of the matrix and its adjoint, making it suitable for black-box environments where accessing individual matrix entries is computationally expensive or infeasible. We show tagging requires a constant number of matrix-vector products coupled with linear post-processing; crucially, the asymptotic pre-factors in tagging depend only on the rank parameter and the underlying problem geometry. We also establish a theoretical connection between the optimal construction of tagging matrices and projective varieties in algebraic geometry, suggesting a hybrid numeric-symbolic avenue of future work. To validate our approach, we apply tagging to compress uniform BLR matrices arising from the discretization of integral and partial differential equations. Empirical results show that tagging outperforms alternative compression techniques, significantly reducing both the number of required matrix-vector products and overall computational time. These findings highlight the practicality and scalability of tagging as an efficient method for flat rank-structured matrices in scientific computing.

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arXiv2023

Adaptive Parallelizable Algorithms for Interpolative Decompositions via Partially Pivoted LU

Interpolative and CUR decompositions involve "natural bases" of row and column subsets, or skeletons, of a given matrix that approximately span its row and column spaces. These low-rank decompositions preserve properties such as sparsity or non-negativity, and are easily interpretable in the context of the original data. For large-scale problems, randomized sketching to sample the row or column spaces with a random matrix can serve as an effective initial step in skeleton selection to reduce computational cost. A by now well-established approach has been to extract a randomized sketch, followed by column-pivoted QR CPQR) on the sketch matrix. This manuscript describes an alternative approach where CPQR is replaced by LU with partial pivoting (LUPP). While LUPP by itself is not rank-revealing, it is demonstrated that when used in a randomized setting, LUPP not only reveals the numerical rank, but also allows the estimation of the residual error as the factorization is built. The resulting algorithm is both adaptive and parallelizable, and attains much higher practical speed due to the lower communication requirements of LUPP over CPQR. The method has been implemented for both CPUs and GPUs, and the resulting software has been made publicly available.

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arXiv2022

Robust Parameter Identifiability Analysis via Column Subset Selection

We advocate a numerically reliable and accurate approach for practical parameter identifiability analysis: Applying column subset selection (CSS) to the sensitivity matrix, instead of computing an eigenvalue decomposition of the Fischer information matrix. Identifiability analysis via CSS has three advantages: (i) It quantifies reliability of the subsets of parameters selected as identifiable and unidentifiable. (ii) It establishes criteria for comparing the accuracy of different algorithms. (iii) The implementations are numerically more accurate and reliable than eigenvalue methods applied to the Fischer matrix, yet without an increase in computational cost. The effectiveness of the CSS methods is illustrated with extensive numerical experiments on sensitivity matrices from six physical models, as well as on adversarial synthetic matrices. Among the CSS methods, we recommend an implementation based on the strong rank-revealing QR algorithm because of its rigorous accuracy guarantees for both identifiable and non-identifiable parameters.

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arXiv2022

Application and reduction of a nonlinear hyperelastic wall model capturing ex vivo relationships between fluid pressure, area and wall thickness in normal and hypertensive murine left pulmonary arteries

Pulmonary hypertension is a cardiovascular disorder manifested by elevated arterial blood pressure together with vessel wall stiffening and thickening due to alterations in collagen, elastin and smooth muscle cells. Hypoxia-induced (type 3) pulmonary hypertension can be studied in animals exposed to a low oxygen environment for prolonged time periods leading to biomechanical alterations in vessel wall structure. This study formulates and systematically reduces a nonlinear elastic structural wall model for a large pulmonary artery, generating a novel pressure-area relation capturing remodeling in type 3 pulmonary hypertension. The model is calibrated using {\em ex vivo} measurements of vessel diameter and wall thickness changes, under controlled flow conditions, in left pulmonary arteries isolated from control and hypertensive mice. A two-layer, hyperelastic, anisotropic model incorporating residual stresses is formulated using the Holzapfel-Gasser-Ogden model. Complex relations predicting vessel area and wall thickness with increasing blood pressure are derived and calibrated using the data. Sensitivity analysis, parameter estimation and subset selection are used to systematically reduce the 16-parameter model to one in which a much smaller subset of identifiable parameters is estimated via solution of an inverse problem. Our final reduced model includes a single set of three elastic moduli. Estimated ranges of these parameters demonstrate that nonlinear stiffening is dominated by elastin in the control animals and by collagen in the hypertensive group. The novel pressure-area relation developed in this study has potential impact on one-dimensional fluids network models of vessel wall remodeling in the presence of cardiovascular disease.

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