Accelerated Evolving Set Processes for Local PageRank Computation

Published: 18 Sept 2025, Last Modified: 29 Oct 2025NeurIPS 2025 posterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Personalized PageRank, Local methods, Sublinear methods
TL;DR: we propose a new local acceleration framework based on inexact proximal operators (e.g., Catalyst acceleration).
Abstract: This work proposes a novel framework based on nested evolving set processes to accelerate Personalized PageRank (PPR) computation. At each stage of the process, we employ a localized inexact proximal point iteration to solve a simplified linear system. We show that the time complexity of such localized methods is upper bounded by $\min\{\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(R^2/\epsilon^2), \tilde{\mathcal{O}}(m)\}$ to obtain an $\epsilon$-approximation of the PPR vector, where $m$ denotes the number of edges in the graph and $R$ is a constant defined via nested evolving set processes. Furthermore, the algorithms induced by our framework require solving only $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\sqrt{\alpha})$ such linear systems, where $\alpha$ is the damping factor. When $1/\epsilon^2\ll m$, this implies the existence of an algorithm that computes an $\epsilon$-approximation of the PPR vector with an overall time complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(R^2 / (\sqrt{\alpha}\epsilon^2))$, independent of the underlying graph size. Our result resolves an open conjecture from existing literature. Experimental results on real-world graphs validate the efficiency of our methods, demonstrating significant convergence in the early stages.
Supplementary Material: zip
Primary Area: General machine learning (supervised, unsupervised, online, active, etc.)
Submission Number: 3716
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