Where to find doc for sparse tensor operation?

1

Hi,

I have a big sparse matrix in CUDA and I need to multiply it by a dense vector; so I am looking for a sparse x dense -> dense operation, possibly using CUDA.

I have been searching for a while, but I can’t find any documentation for sparse x dense -> dense operation; I don’t know the difference between torch.mm, torch.spmm, torch.hsmm, torch.sspmm and all the functions detailed here: http://pytorch.org/docs/master/sparse.html#torch.sparse.FloatTensor.hspmm

What are these function doing? What function should I use in my situation?

2

In master, we reorganized the sparse code to remove all of these extra sparse operations, so you can just use a plain old matrix multiply to go sparse x dense -> dense

i = torch.LongTensor([[0, 1, 1], 
                  [2, 0, 2]])
v = torch.FloatTensor([3, 4, 5]) 
s = torch.sparse.FloatTensor(i, v, torch.Size([2,3]))
d = s.to_dense()
s.matmul(d.t())
3

Thank you! Are these changes already available in version 0.1.12_2?

But in your example, wound’t call .to_dense() defeat the purpose of using sparse matrices, by converting it to a full tensor?

If I have a sparse matrix and a dense vector, I want to do something like

res_vector = sparse_matrix.mm(dense_vector)

Will that use sparse operations?

4

The call of to_dense() was just for illustrative purposes, to get a dense tensor to multiply against the sparse one :wink:

I don’t think these changes are in 0.1.12. You’ll probably need master.

Assuming that mm accepts the dimensions of your arguments, mm will use sparse operations.

5

Alright, thank you! :slight_smile:

So in 0.1.12 torch.mm() will not take advantage of sparse operation?

6

Well, if it works, it is definitely doing a sparse operation (we didn’t put any performance cliff operators in.)

1 Like
7

Great! Thank you for your answer :wink: