Algebraic Multigrid Acceleration for Efficient Label Spreading
Authors: Antonia van Betteray, Jonathan Klees, Miriam Schäfers, Matthias Rottmann
Organizations: Osnabrück University, Institute for Computer Science, Osnabrück, Germany · Ruhr University Bochum, Institute for Computer Science, Bochum, Germany
Modern machine learning models rely on large amounts of labeled data. However, manual annotation of large-scale datasets is expensive and time-consuming. Label spreading is a semi-supervised learning technique that addresses this challenge by propagating information from a few labeled examples to a larger pool of unlabeled data. Despite its effectiveness, its application to large-scale, high-dimensional datasets is limited by computational costs and memory constraints. To address these limitations, we propose Algebraic Multigrid Acceleration for Efficient Label Spreading (AMELS), an efficient label spreading framework that improves scalability by fast construction of neighborhood graphs and the incorporation of algebraic multigrid solvers. The latter is an iterative solver that replaces the ordinary random walk iteration typically performed in label spreading. Due to the multilevel nature of algebraic multigrid solvers, AMELS spreads given label information across a graph of any size in a single multigrid cycle. We demonstrate that AMELS achieves significant runtime reductions compared to existing implementations while also being more robust to hyperparameter choices in terms of both runtime and classification accuracy. Our framework therefore enables efficient label spreading on large-scale image datasets and produces accurate labels even when only a few labeled samples are available.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Overview of our proposed framework AMELS : To apply label spreading on large-scale image datasets, a k -NN graph is constructed in the embedding space of a feature extractor such as CLIP. For efficient graph construction, we use FAISS’s implementation that accelerates nearest neighbor search on a GPU. Most importantly, to efficiently approximate the solution to label spreading, we employ AMG solvers which iteratively coarsen and interpolate the problem, significantly reducing computational complexity.
Fig. 2 : (a): AMG V -cycle with 2 levels. On each level pre- and post-smoothing steps based on eq. 5 are applied, while the coarsest level is solved directly. (b) Schematic illustration of GMRES with AMG preconditioning.
Fig. 3 : Classification accuracy of different label spreading implementations on EMNIST-digits, CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet depending on their runtime to approximate the solution. Performance is smoothed with a moving average kernel and empirical standard deviation is displayed.
Fig. 4 : Efficiency comparison of different label spreading implementations. Runtime in seconds (a) and the number of iterations (b) averaged over 10 runs is displayed for varying dataset sizes of the EMNIST-digits dataset.
Fig. 5 : Runtime (a) and classification accuracy (b) of different label spreading implementations on EMNIST-digits depending on the spreading intensity α . Our method AMELS is least sensitive to the choice of α regarding both runtime and performance.
Fig. 6 : Runtime (a) and classification accuracy (b) of different label spreading implementations on EMNIST-digits depending on the number of neighbors k used for graph construction.
Fig. A.1 : Condition number of the graph Laplacian I−αS depending on the spreading intensity α .
Graph-based semi-supervised learning uses relationships among labeled and unlabeled examples to spread supervision and improve prediction with few labels.
Semi-supervised learning aims to infer class labels using only a small fraction of labeled data. In graph-based semi-supervised learning, this is typically achieved through label propagation to predict labels of unlabeled nodes. However, in real-world applications, data often arrive incrementally in batches. Each time a new batch appears, reapplying the traditional label propagation algorithm to recompute all labels is redundant, computationally intensive, and inefficient. To address the absence of an efficient label propagation update method, we propose DynLP, a novel GPU-centric Dynamic Batched Parallel Label Propagation algorithm that performs only the necessary updates, propagating changes to the relevant subgraph without requiring full recalculation. By exploiting GPU architectural optimizations, our algorithm achieves on average 13x and upto 102x speedup on large-scale datasets compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
S M Shovan, Arindam Khanda, S M Ferdous +2
Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO, USA · Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA
Extreme multi-label classification (XMC) involves learning models over large output spaces with millions of labels, making the output layer a memory-compute bottleneck. While sparsity-based methods reduce arithmetic complexity, they often fail to yield proportional speedups due to irregular memory access, poor hardware utilization, or reliance on auxiliary architectural components in long-tailed regimes. We introduce group-shared fixed fan-in sparsity, a semi-structured output-layer design in which semantically related labels share a sparse input pattern while retaining independent weights. This grouping introduces a task-aligned inductive bias -- encouraging related labels to share feature subsets -- while reducing index memory overhead, increasing feature reuse across labels, and enabling efficient GPU execution via custom CUDA kernels that leverage modern accelerator primitives. As an alternative to auxiliary objectives, we exploit the long-tailed structure of XMC by decomposing the output layer into a small dense head over frequent labels and a group-shared sparse tail over the remainder, providing an informative gradient pathway while preserving the memory benefits of sparsity. Through kernel-level microbenchmarking, we show that group-shared fixed fan-in translates arithmetic reductions into practical wall-clock gains, achieving up to 4.4× speedup in the forward pass and up to 25× speedup in backward passes over standard fixed fan-in sparsity, while operating within a few percent of a FLOPs-matched dense bottleneck. Across large-scale XMC benchmarks, our approach matches or improves precision@k over prior sparse baselines, while narrowing the performance gap to dense.
Nasib Ullah, Jinbin Zhang, Jean Lucien Randrianantenaina +2
Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland · Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK. · IST Austria.
Semi-supervised node classification is a foundational task in graph machine learning, yet state-of-the-art Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are hindered by significant computational overhead and reliance on strong homophily assumptions. Traditional GNNs require expensive iterative training and multi-layer message passing, while existing training-free methods, such as Label Propagation, lack adaptability to heterophilo-us graph structures. This paper presents \textbf{F2LP-AP} (Fast and Flexible Label Propagation with Adaptive Propagation Kernel), a training-free, computationally efficient framework that adapts to local graph topology. Our method constructs robust class prototypes via the geometric median and dynamically adjusts propagation parameters based on the Local Clustering Coefficient (LCC), enabling effective modeling of both homophilous and heterophilous graphs without gradient-based training. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that \textbf{F2LP-AP} achieves competitive or superior accuracy compared to trained GNNs, while significantly outperforming existing baselines in computational efficiency.