Optimal Algorithms for Linear Algebra in the Current Matrix Multiplication Time

We study fundamental problems in linear algebra, such as finding a maximal linearly independent subset of rows or columns (a basis), solving linear regression, or computing a subspace embedding. For these problems, we consider input matrices $\mathbf{A}\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$ with $n > d$. The input can be read in $\text{nnz}(\mathbf{A})$ time, which denotes the number of nonzero entries of $\mathbf{A}$. In this paper, we show that beyond the time required to read the input matrix, these fundamental linear algebra problems can be solved in $d^ω$ time, i.e., where $ω\approx 2.37$ is the current matrix-multiplication exponent. To do so, we introduce a constant-factor subspace embedding with the optimal $m=\mathcal{O}(d)$ number of rows, and which can be applied in time $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{\text{nnz}(\mathbf{A})}α\right) + d^{2 + α}\text{poly}(\log d)$ for any trade-off parameter $α>0$, tightening a recent result by Chepurko et. al. [SODA 2022] that achieves an $\exp(\text{poly}(\log\log n))$ distortion with $m=d\cdot\text{poly}(\log\log d)$ rows in $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{\text{nnz}(\mathbf{A})}α+d^{2+α+o(1)}\right)$ time. Our subspace embedding uses a recently shown property of stacked Subsampled Randomized Hadamard Transforms (SRHT), which actually increase the input dimension, to "spread" the mass of an input vector among a large number of coordinates, followed by random sampling. To control the effects of random sampling, we use fast semidefinite programming to reweight the rows. We then use our constant-factor subspace embedding to give the first optimal runtime algorithms for finding a maximal linearly independent subset of columns, regression, and leverage score sampling. To do so, we also introduce a novel subroutine that iteratively grows a set of independent rows, which may be of independent interest.