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

Blocked Leverage Score Sampling in the Randomized Alternating Least Squares CP Tensor Decomposition

May 21, 2026, 11:50 AM
25m
Torgersen Hall 1010

Torgersen Hall 1010

Minisymposium Talk Topics in Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra Topics in Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra

Speaker

Dr Karl Pierce (University of Maryland, College Park)

Description

The CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition is a powerful tool used for multiway data analysis and to break the “curse of dimensionality” associated with higher-order tensors. The most common way to compute the CP decomposition of a tensor is via a standard alternating least squares (CP-ALS) algorithm. With the CP-ALS, one must iteratively solve a set of overdetermined least squares problem which can quickly become expensive in time and memory. Recently, Battaglino et al[1] developed a randomized CP-ALS algorithm that significantly reduced the cost of the optimization procedure with little impact on the CP decomposition's accuracy. The strategy leverages the structure of the Khatri-Rao product to efficiently compute a sampling probability distribution for each least squares sub-problem. Unfortunately, on modern computer architecture sampling a tensor is a memory-bound operation, i.e. the computational performance of the randomized CP-ALS method can become bound by the bandwidth and latency of a machine. This work seeks to improve on the computational performance of the randomized, sampled CP-ALS strategy by studying the effects of sampling blocks of columns in each least squares problem. In this talk, we illustrate how block-wise sampling impacts the theoretical performance of the randomized CP-ALS algorithm and provide numerical results comparing the block and standard sampled CP-ALS decomposition.

References:
[1]. Casey Battaglino, Grey Ballard, and Tamara G. Kolda. A practical randomized CP tensor decomposition. SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 39(2):876–901, 2018.

Authors

Dr Jamie Haddock (Harvey Mudd College) Julian Bellavita (Cornell University) Kamrun Nahar Keya (Arizona State University) Dr Karl Pierce (University of Maryland, College Park) Dr Tamara Kolda (MathSci.ai) Yucong Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology)

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