May 18 – 22, 2026
Virginia Tech
America/New_York timezone

Unknown hierarchies, hyperbolic PDE, and randomized rank detection

May 21, 2026, 11:25 AM
25m
McBryde Hall 113 (Virginia Tech)

McBryde Hall 113

Virginia Tech

Minisymposium Talk Hierarchical Low-Rank Approximations: Algorithms and Applications Hierarchical Low-Rank Approximations: Algorithms and Applications

Speaker

Christopher Wang (Cornell University)

Description

We describe a problem arising from operator learning for hyperbolic PDEs, in which one would like to recover an unknown, non-standard low-rank hierarchical partition of a linear operator using only input-output data, or, in the finite-dimensional case, matrix-vector products. We provide a solution to the operator learning problem by employing a continuous analogue of the randomized SVD (RSVD) to decide whether the operator, restricted to a given subdomain, is numerically low-rank or not. Doing so requires the RSVD to obtain good singular subspace estimates, which in theory depends on the sizes of gaps between singular values of the operator. Thus, in the second part of this talk, we derive exact descriptions for the angular error of the approximate singular subspaces returned by the RSVD, which helps explain why large singular value gaps are typically not required in practice.

Authors

Christopher Wang (Cornell University) Alex Townsend (Cornell University)

Presentation materials

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