,
Michał Dereziński
,
Xiaoyu Dong
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
An oblivious subspace embedding is a random m× n matrix Π such that, for any d-dimensional subspace, with high probability Π preserves the norms of all vectors in that subspace within a 1±ε factor. In this work, we give an oblivious subspace embedding with the optimal dimension m = Θ(d/ε²) that has a near-optimal sparsity of Õ(1/ε) non-zero entries per column of Π. This is the first result to nearly match the conjecture of Nelson and Nguyen [FOCS 2013] in terms of the best sparsity attainable by an optimal oblivious subspace embedding, improving on a prior bound of Õ(1/ε⁶) non-zeros per column [Chenakkod et al., STOC 2024]. We further extend our approach to the non-oblivious setting, proposing a new family of Leverage Score Sparsified embeddings with Independent Columns, which yield faster runtimes for matrix approximation and regression tasks. In our analysis, we develop a new method which uses a decoupling argument together with the cumulant method for bounding the edge universality error of isotropic random matrices. To achieve near-optimal sparsity, we combine this general-purpose approach with new trace inequalities that leverage the specific structure of our subspace embedding construction.
@InProceedings{chenakkod_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.55,
author = {Chenakkod, Shabarish and Derezi\'{n}ski, Micha{\l} and Dong, Xiaoyu},
title = {{Optimal Oblivious Subspace Embeddings with Near-Optimal Sparsity}},
booktitle = {52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025)},
pages = {55:1--55:20},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-372-0},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2025},
volume = {334},
editor = {Censor-Hillel, Keren and Grandoni, Fabrizio and Ouaknine, Jo\"{e}l and Puppis, Gabriele},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.55},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-234324},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.55},
annote = {Keywords: Randomized linear algebra, matrix sketching, subspace embeddings}
}