La storia antica della decomposizione dei valori singolari (1993) [pdf](math.ucdavis.edu)
math.ucdavis.edu
The early History of the Singular Value Decomposition (1993) [pdf]
https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~saito/courses/229A/stewart-svd.pdf
34 comments
For the curious, eigenvalues only exist for square matrices. Singular values are like generalized eigenvalues.
Singular values are like the fundamental frequencies of your matrix. You know how you can define any color with RGB? In a (pretty handwavy) way, singular values are like RGB color codes for us math guys.
Optimizers like Muon and Adam play around with weights' first, or second order singular values to train models.
Singular values are like the fundamental frequencies of your matrix. You know how you can define any color with RGB? In a (pretty handwavy) way, singular values are like RGB color codes for us math guys.
Optimizers like Muon and Adam play around with weights' first, or second order singular values to train models.
Just going to sound really pedantic here, but RGB does not capture the entire colour space. In fact, it only captures about 35% of the colours the human eye can perceive.
https://www.oceanopticsbook.info/view/photometry-and-visibil...
https://www.oceanopticsbook.info/view/photometry-and-visibil...
You seem to be conflating "RGB" with one particular RGB color space: sRGB. That's a common enough conflation to make, but not appropriate when you're trying to be pedantic.
Doesn't matter: there's no RGB model that captures the colour space. That exactly the reason CIE exists.
CIE (1931) is a RGB color space, based on monochromatic primary colors with wavelengths of 700 nm (red), 546.1 nm (green) and 435.8 nm (blue).
However the entire color space of CIE RGB (1931) includes points where some of the RGB components are negative.
Because positive components are sometimes desirable (e.g. because one can make light filters whose outputs are those components), the alternative XYZ representation is derived by computation from the original CIE RGB, which had been obtained from experiments with human subjects.
Any RGB model can capture the entire color space, even sRGB. The limitation is not at capturing, but only at reproducing colors when using RGB emitters, because the emitters cannot reproduce components with negative values.
There are no RGB models that can capture the entire color space without having points where some components are negative. This is caused mostly by defects of the human color vision, e.g. by the fact that the red receptors are also sensitive to violet light, not only to red light, and by the fact that the selectivity curves of the photoreceptors do not have ideal shapes.
However the entire color space of CIE RGB (1931) includes points where some of the RGB components are negative.
Because positive components are sometimes desirable (e.g. because one can make light filters whose outputs are those components), the alternative XYZ representation is derived by computation from the original CIE RGB, which had been obtained from experiments with human subjects.
Any RGB model can capture the entire color space, even sRGB. The limitation is not at capturing, but only at reproducing colors when using RGB emitters, because the emitters cannot reproduce components with negative values.
There are no RGB models that can capture the entire color space without having points where some components are negative. This is caused mostly by defects of the human color vision, e.g. by the fact that the red receptors are also sensitive to violet light, not only to red light, and by the fact that the selectivity curves of the photoreceptors do not have ideal shapes.
Since you seem to know, and I am curious, doesn't CIE[1] effectively use RGB to describe its space, too? Eg: the r̅(λ) g̅(λ) b̅(λ) color matching functions? Or is there something else in CIE you're referring to?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
Okay, but that was a really useful metaphor if incomplete in a lot of ways. It made me say “oh”.
This is solved through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color#Imaginary_primar... that sit outside the visible spectrum.
Last statement is a bit sus... Muon computes matrix sign function which can be defined as setting singular values to 1, though you can also define it without SVD. Muon itself doesn't use SVD because it uses a faster method to compute matrix sign. Adam doesn't do anything related to SVD or singular values. Also not sure what you meant by "second order singular values"
ADAM is related if your second derivative matrix happens to be diagonal.
Of course, it takes about 5 minutes to show that any DNN is going to have very very high magnitude off-diagonal terms by the way it's constructed, so pretending that a diagonal approximation is close enough is crazy.
Of course, it takes about 5 minutes to show that any DNN is going to have very very high magnitude off-diagonal terms by the way it's constructed, so pretending that a diagonal approximation is close enough is crazy.
Adam doesn't use the second derivatives matrix, it uses second moments of the gradient, which is the diagonal of the uncentered covariance matrix, but neither of them are directly related to SVD or singular values anyway.
There is a slight connection where Adam approximates full-matrix Adagrad which computes inverse square root of the convariance matrix, which you usually do using eigendecomposition, but on the covariance matrix SVD and eigendecomposition are equivalent (can easily be converted to each other), so you could use SVD to compute the inverse square root.
There is a slight connection where Adam approximates full-matrix Adagrad which computes inverse square root of the convariance matrix, which you usually do using eigendecomposition, but on the covariance matrix SVD and eigendecomposition are equivalent (can easily be converted to each other), so you could use SVD to compute the inverse square root.
The second moments of the gradient and the Hessian are absolutely related!
See the Fisher Information, and the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (an inequality on how much the inverse covariance matrix and the Hessian can differ).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_information
See the Fisher Information, and the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (an inequality on how much the inverse covariance matrix and the Hessian can differ).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_information
I didn't find a direct proof earlier, just assertions - I've only seen it proved in textbooks that aren't linkable.
Theorem 1, section 1.3, page 2 shows that the expected variance of the gradient of the loss function and the expected second derivative of the loss function are equal at the minimum. I hate that the ADAM paper did not talk about this, this is something that is hammered into anyone who has taken a mathematical statistics course. This has been an established fact in statistics for well over 100 years.
https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/ece563/fa2025/Notes11-...
Away from the minimum they can diverge, but there is a close enough connection to make it an extremely useful approximation.
Theorem 1, section 1.3, page 2 shows that the expected variance of the gradient of the loss function and the expected second derivative of the loss function are equal at the minimum. I hate that the ADAM paper did not talk about this, this is something that is hammered into anyone who has taken a mathematical statistics course. This has been an established fact in statistics for well over 100 years.
https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/ece563/fa2025/Notes11-...
Away from the minimum they can diverge, but there is a close enough connection to make it an extremely useful approximation.
The SVD seems to come up everywhere in my work in computer vision. I find myself continuously using the various C++/Eigen SVD implementations. Actually I should speak in the past tense. Claude and Codex are now generating all my code for me now, and I see them spitting out SVD code frequently -- often for very special cases. SVD truly is an amazing tool.
It comes up anywhere that youre working with data that has some sort of correlation structure.
In image processing, the SVD makes it possible to talk about all the rich spatial correlations in the image, and pick out the strongest ones and discard noise.
This is also why it's so ubiquitous in compression algorithms, and of central importance in stuff like quantum information.
In image processing, the SVD makes it possible to talk about all the rich spatial correlations in the image, and pick out the strongest ones and discard noise.
This is also why it's so ubiquitous in compression algorithms, and of central importance in stuff like quantum information.
what work are you doing in computer vision that isn't entirely ML these days?
I'll give you one example, an often first step to solving the Perspective N Point (PNP) problem involves using the Direct Linear Transform (DLT) method which boils down to solving AX = 0 where A in a 12x2N matrix (N can be 6 to 500). The best way to solve this is with SVD. The first published PNP solver (for N = 3) dates to 1841 (did not use SVD) and we still are solving that problem now and I imagine we will still be solving it in 100 years (?).
> Claude and Codex are now generating all my code for me now, and I see them spitting out SVD code frequently -- often for very special cases.
I find this so annoying. I had to PR some Claude-generated gaussian elimination routine last month and making sure it got the pivoting logic correct was a waste of my time.
I find this so annoying. I had to PR some Claude-generated gaussian elimination routine last month and making sure it got the pivoting logic correct was a waste of my time.
You are doing it wrong. Have Claude generate the test code and log test data that it can feed back into itself. Claude can generate tests and verify the code better than humans now. I don't trust humans to get things right anymore -- I have a PhD and Claude knows all the math and libraries better than me.
> You are doing it wrong.
I didn’t write any of it. I occasionally get assigned PRs written (or not, in this case) by other devs.
> Claude can generate tests and verify the code better than humans now.
It certainly didn’t do that in this case.
> I don't trust humans to get things right anymore -- I have a PhD and Claude knows all the math and libraries better than me.
If it knows all the libraries so well, why did it add a bespoke implementation?
I didn’t write any of it. I occasionally get assigned PRs written (or not, in this case) by other devs.
> Claude can generate tests and verify the code better than humans now.
It certainly didn’t do that in this case.
> I don't trust humans to get things right anymore -- I have a PhD and Claude knows all the math and libraries better than me.
If it knows all the libraries so well, why did it add a bespoke implementation?
If you're getting code without tests to review in a PR, that should be an instant reject without even looking at the code.
Go ahead and have claude add and run units tests for you as part of the PR review process.
That's on the submitter of the PR to do. Don't put that burden on the reviewer.
I don’t get paid to do my job and then also the submitter’s job.
> If you're getting code without tests to review in a PR, that should be an instant reject without even looking at the code.
Management didn’t like that the last time I was assigned a AI-gen PR and I like my job otherwise.
Management didn’t like that the last time I was assigned a AI-gen PR and I like my job otherwise.
How big of an advantage was it, to have the code developed specifically for your project? These AI tools are pretty impressive, but why not have it generate a call to BLAS or PARDISO or something?
Some fun stuff about SVDs:
If you want to take a low rank approximation to a matrix D, let's call our approximation D'. The approximation that minimizes mean square error of the reconstructed matrix vs. the original (i.e. ||D - D'||_F, the Frobenius norm of their differences) happens to be the truncated SVD, by the Eckart–Young–Mirsky theorem [0].
I'm not claiming it's a practical way to do so, but this means that if you set up a neural network w/o nonlinearities that goes U -> S -> V^T, where S is a truncated scaling vector, and U and V^T are trained weights, make your loss function the MSE of reconstruction error, and minimize it with gradient descent, you will end up with the same U, S, and V that an SVD gives you.
In fact, this is basically exactly what a Variational Autoencoder [1] is! Way too few people realize this connection, and I wish it was taught in more ML courses. VAEs just add nonlinearities between U -> nonlinearity -> S -> nonlinearity -> V^T, and a KL-divergence regularization term. (Well VAEs are trained as operators to reconstruct vectors, and the S is an embedding not a trained weight, so I'm being a little sloppy, but still the connection is strong).
Once you realize this, you can have a lot of fun... anywhere you see an SVD being useful, you can construct arbitrary neural networks to replace them, and any time an SVD doesn't quite fit, e.g. you have binary data, realize that VAEs are just the same thing you can make all kinds of bespoke changes to... don't want MSE as your reconstruction error? Fine, use something else, but it's basically just an SVD!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-rank_approximation#Basic_l... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variational_autoencoder
If you want to take a low rank approximation to a matrix D, let's call our approximation D'. The approximation that minimizes mean square error of the reconstructed matrix vs. the original (i.e. ||D - D'||_F, the Frobenius norm of their differences) happens to be the truncated SVD, by the Eckart–Young–Mirsky theorem [0].
I'm not claiming it's a practical way to do so, but this means that if you set up a neural network w/o nonlinearities that goes U -> S -> V^T, where S is a truncated scaling vector, and U and V^T are trained weights, make your loss function the MSE of reconstruction error, and minimize it with gradient descent, you will end up with the same U, S, and V that an SVD gives you.
In fact, this is basically exactly what a Variational Autoencoder [1] is! Way too few people realize this connection, and I wish it was taught in more ML courses. VAEs just add nonlinearities between U -> nonlinearity -> S -> nonlinearity -> V^T, and a KL-divergence regularization term. (Well VAEs are trained as operators to reconstruct vectors, and the S is an embedding not a trained weight, so I'm being a little sloppy, but still the connection is strong).
Once you realize this, you can have a lot of fun... anywhere you see an SVD being useful, you can construct arbitrary neural networks to replace them, and any time an SVD doesn't quite fit, e.g. you have binary data, realize that VAEs are just the same thing you can make all kinds of bespoke changes to... don't want MSE as your reconstruction error? Fine, use something else, but it's basically just an SVD!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-rank_approximation#Basic_l... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variational_autoencoder
Aren't you skipping over the noise/stochasticity part from the sampling?
Yes, that too, in addition to the other differences I pointed out.
But it's just an SVD with a few more bells and whistles in my view.
But it's just an SVD with a few more bells and whistles in my view.
Can anyone suggest a starting point to be able to read mathematics papers like this and understand them?
Axler’s _Linear Algebra Done Right_ should get you at least part of the way there, content-wise, depending on what other math background you have.
As for reading math papers in general, it’s mostly a process of stepping through it incrementally and trying to verify the steps you don’t understand based on the surrounding context. Most of the concepts in this paper are accessible on Wikipedia or elsewhere, you can make small (e.g. 2 x 2) examples as you go and see what happens.
It’s not an easy skill to acquire from scratch, especially from outside the ivory tower.
As for reading math papers in general, it’s mostly a process of stepping through it incrementally and trying to verify the steps you don’t understand based on the surrounding context. Most of the concepts in this paper are accessible on Wikipedia or elsewhere, you can make small (e.g. 2 x 2) examples as you go and see what happens.
It’s not an easy skill to acquire from scratch, especially from outside the ivory tower.
Bâtarde (or littera bastarda) is a hybrid script that blends formal Gothic blackletter with cursive elements.
https://linear.axler.net/