mlx-vis: GPU-Native Dimensionality Reduction on Apple Silicon

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Authors: Han Xiao
Cited by: 0
References: 4

Abstract

Dimensionality reduction is a foundational tool for visualizing high-dimensional data, yet its reference implementations span a fragmented stack of CPU-bound Python packages that leaves the Metal GPU on Apple Silicon entirely unused. We present mlx-vis, a library that reimplements seven widely used dimensionality reduction methods and k-nearest neighbor graph construction in pure MLX, with every stage -- from PCA preprocessing through embedding optimization to a circle-splatting renderer -- executing on GPU. On Fashion-MNIST 70K, all seven methods embed in 2.1--4.6 s on an M3 Ultra, achieving 3--13x speedups over CPU baselines while reducing the entire dependency stack to MLX and NumPy. The same pipeline scales to ten million points on a single workstation. Code at https://github.com/hanxiao/mlx-vis

Fields of Study & Subjects

Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques Face and Expression Recognition

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
4 March 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint