Solving large, sparse linear systems is a core task in scientific computing, and efficient iterative solvers rely critically on effective and robust preconditioning. While classical methods such as algebraic multigrid (AMG) are highly scalable, their robustness can degrade on indefinite or nonsymmetric systems where heuristics originally developed for elliptic PDEs are less reliable. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as data-driven preconditioners; yet, the practical impact of imposing an AMG-style hierarchy remains underexplored for general sparse matrices. In this work, we propose a Graph Neural Multilevel Preconditioner (GMP) that adopts an AMG hierarchy as a structural prior and learns smoothing, restriction, and interpolation operators in a unified framework. Our method targets general sparse systems and is instantiated as a drop-in preconditioner for standard Krylov solvers. On a benchmark of over 800 sparse matrices, we compare against classical AMG, single-level ILUT, and state-of-the-art GNN preconditioners, and characterize the regimes where multilevel graph neural preconditioning improves convergence or, conversely, introduces overhead relative to strong single-level baselines. These results highlight both the promise and the limitations of enforcing AMG-style multilevel structure in learned preconditioners for large-scale scientific simulations.
Eric Chillón, Artur K. Lidtke, Nguyen Anh Khoa Doan +1physics.comp-ph cs.LG physics.flu-dyn
Solving the pressure-Poisson equation remains the primary computational bottleneck in incompressible unstructured flow solvers primarily due to the inherent sensitivity of traditional linear solvers to mesh irregularities. This work introduces a data-driven algebraic multigrid (AMG) smoother that uses a modified graph convolutional isomorphism network (GCIN). The graph neural network predicts optimal polynomial coefficients to construct a sparse pseudo-inverse operator across diverse grid topologies. The coefficients are optimized to reduce the residual after each V-cycle iteration. By directly capturing the algebraic structure of the system from the sparse coefficient matrix, the proposed method maintains the solver's linearity while adapting to local anisotropies in unstructured grids. Our framework demonstrates significant performance gains by reducing the number of V-cycles required for a given tolerance and delivering wall-clock speedups from 4% to 37% across diverse benchmarks. Notably, the model exhibits robust generalization by maintaining efficiency on meshes up to 128 times larger than those seen in training, and by accelerating the solver's convergence on unseen industry-relevant problems such as the AirfRANS dataset.