Quantile Randomized Kaczmarz Algorithm with Whitelist Trust Mechanism

2026-02-12

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Calibration & Uncertainty Quantification
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Stochastic Optimization
• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

Randomized Kaczmarz (RK) is a simple and fast solver for consistent overdetermined systems, but it is known to be fragile under noise. We study overdetermined $m\times n$ linear systems with a sparse set of corrupted equations, $ {\bf A}{\bf x}^\star = {\bf b}, $where only $\tilde{\bf b} = {\bf b} + \boldsymbol{\varepsilon}$ is observed with $\|\boldsymbol{\varepsilon}\|_0 \le \beta m$. The recently introduced QuantileRK (QRK) algorithm addresses this issue by testing residuals against a quantile threshold, but computing a per-iteration quantile across many rows is costly. In this work we (i) reanalyze QRK and show that its convergence rate improves monotonically as the corruption fraction $\beta$ decreases; (ii) propose a simple online detector that flags and removes unreliable rows, which reduces the effective $\beta$ and speeds up convergence; and (iii) make the method practical by estimating quantiles from a small random subsample of rows, preserving robustness while lowering the per-iteration cost. Simulations on imaging and synthetic data demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.

Problem

• robust linear systems
• corrupted equations
• sparse noise
• overdetermined systems
• noisy data

Innovation

• Quantile Randomized Kaczmarz
• Whitelist Trust Mechanism
• Robust Linear Solvers
• Online Outlier Detection
• Subsampled Quantile Estimation