Learning from Linear Algebra: A Graph Neural Network Approach to Preconditioner Design for Conjugate Gradient Solvers

Large linear systems are ubiquitous in modern computational science and engineering. The main recipe for solving them is the use of Krylov subspace iterative methods with well-designed preconditioners. Deep learning models can be used as nonlinear preconditioners during the iteration of linear solvers such as the conjugate gradient (CG) method. Neural network models require an enormous number of parameters to approximate well in this setup. Another approach is to take advantage of small graph neural networks (GNNs) to construct preconditioners with predefined sparsity patterns. Recently, GNNs have been shown to be a promising tool for designing preconditioners to reduce the overall computational cost of iterative methods by constructing them more efficiently than with classical linear algebra techniques. However, preconditioners designed with these approaches cannot outperform those designed with classical methods in terms of the number of iterations in CG. In our work, we recall well-established preconditioners from linear algebra and use them as a starting point for training the GNN to obtain preconditioners that reduce the condition number of the system more significantly. Numerical experiments show that our approach outperforms both classical and neural network-based methods for an important class of parametric partial differential equations. We also provide a heuristic justification for the loss function used and show that preconditioners obtained by learning with this loss function reduce the condition number in a more desirable way for CG.