Graph Neural Multilevel Preconditioners for Iterative Solvers
Zechen Zhang, Rui Peng Li, Yousef Saad
Abstract
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.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.