Towards Singular Value Decomposition for Rank-Deficient Matrices: An Efficient and Accurate Algorithm on GPU Architectures

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a fundamental tool in numerous scientific and engineering domains. Many high-performance libraries, such as LAPACK, MAGMA, and cuSOLVER, provide general, truncated, and randomized SVD routines. However, when the input is a low-rank matrix whose rank is not explicitly known, existing routines usually treat it as full-rank, which leads to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient SVD algorithm specifically for rank-deficient matrices based on a recently proposed rank-revealing QR factorization, termed QB factorization. To further enhance numerical stability and efficiency, we introduce a Householder QB factorization and a mixed-precision SVD algorithm, accompanied by a rigorous error analysis demonstrating correctness and stability. Experimental results show that our method achieves up to 6978.71x speedup over the general (full) SVD routine in cuSOLVER and is 9.99x faster than randomized SVD in FP32 precision. Moreover, our method exhibits higher numerical accuracy than cuSOLVER full SVD, achieving substantially smaller backward errors while maintaining stable and reliable singular values. Beyond synthetic benchmarks, we also demonstrate its effectiveness in an image compression application with higher efficiency.