Skip to content

Add MLX compatibility for IncrementalCCA #25

Description

@cboulay

Problem

IncrementalCCA describes its implementation as Array API compatible, but it does not currently run with MLX arrays.

Reproduced on an M4 Pro with MLX 0.32.0:

import mlx.core as mx
from ezmsg.learn.model.cca import IncrementalCCA

model = IncrementalCCA(n_components=1)
model.partial_fit(mx.random.normal((32, 4)), mx.random.normal((32, 3)))

This fails immediately with:

AttributeError: module 'mlx.core.linalg' has no attribute 'matrix_transpose'

Additional compatibility blockers

  • mlx.core.linalg does not provide matrix_transpose; use a namespace-level transpose/permutation operation instead.
  • mlx.core.linalg does not provide matrix_norm; the Frobenius norm can be expressed with elementwise operations and a reduction.
  • eigh and svd require an explicit MLX CPU stream. Unified memory means their results can remain MLX arrays.
  • initialize currently requests float64 on the input device, but MLX GPU arrays do not support float64.
  • bool(xp.any(...)) and float(...) in the adaptive-smoothing path introduce per-update device-to-host synchronization.

Affected code is in src/ezmsg/learn/model/cca.py.

Proposed scope

  • Preserve MLX input/state/output arrays and use an MLX-supported floating dtype.
  • Replace unsupported linalg transpose and norm calls with portable Array API operations.
  • Schedule MLX eigendecomposition and SVD explicitly on mx.cpu.
  • Review the adaptive-smoothing scalar state so unavoidable synchronization is documented and avoidable synchronization is removed.
  • Add MLX tests comparing partial_fit and transform against NumPy across multiple updates.
  • Profile the resulting implementation; the decompositions are CPU-only, so correctness should be established before claiming a performance benefit.

Acceptance criteria

  • IncrementalCCA.partial_fit and transform complete with MLX float32 inputs.
  • Learned matrices, weights, correlations, and transformed outputs remain MLX arrays.
  • Numerical results match the NumPy implementation within an appropriate float32 tolerance.
  • Tests cover first and subsequent adaptive updates and update_projections=True/False.

Activity

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    bugSomething isn't working

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions