Report on the second Toulouse Tensor Workshop

2026-02-05

AI Summary

The absence of a unified standard for tensor operation interfaces severely hinders interoperability and performance optimization in scientific computing domains such as quantum many-body simulations. To address this challenge, this work organized the Second Toulouse Tensor Workshop, bringing together tensor software developers and domain scientists to iteratively refine an open-source, GitHub-hosted low-level interface standard based on real-world requirements from quantum chemistry, materials science, and related fields. The project not only systematically incorporated community feedback to enhance the existing standard but also initiated, for the first time, a roadmap for standardizing higher-level interfaces and advanced tensor features—including symmetric tensors and structured sparsity—thereby laying the foundation for an open, community-driven ecosystem for tensor computation standards.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Matrix & Tensor Methods
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Computer Vision: Low Level & Physics-based Vision

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

This report documents the program of the second Toulouse Tensor Workshop which took place at the University of Toulouse on September 17-19, 2025, and summarizes the main points of discussion. This workshop follows the first Workshop (CECAM workshop on Tensor Contraction Library Standardization), which took place in Toulouse one year earlier, on May 24-25, 2024 and led to the formation of a tensor standardization working group, which has since specified a low-level standard interface for tensor operations available freely on GitHub. The 2025 workshop brought together developers of applications which rely extensively on tensor computations such as quantum many-body simulations in chemistry and physics (material science and electronic structure calculations), as well as developers and experts of tensor software who have the know-how to provide the technical support for such applications. The workshop enabled the community to provide feedback on the specified low-level interface and how it can be further refined. It also initiated a discussion on how the standardization efforts should be oriented in the near feature, in particular on what should be higher-level interfaces and how to tackle other requirements of the community such as tensor decompositions, symmetric tensors and structured sparsity support.

Problem

• tensor standardization
• tensor operations
• symmetric tensors
• structured sparsity
• tensor decompositions

Innovation

• tensor standardization
• low-level interface
• tensor decomposition
• symmetric tensors
• structured sparsity