Low-rank SI-DSA and GMRES-DSA for Radiative Transfer Equation with Adaptive Accuracy Control

Recently, efficient sweep-based low-rank iterative solvers have been developed to reduce the computational costs of steady-state solves and implicit time integration of the radiative transfer equation (RTE). In particular, angular sampling based on the discrete empirical interpolation method (DEIM) or on error-indicated randomized greedy selection enables efficient, non-intrusive reuse of existing transport sweep implementations. However, randomized-greedy low-rank source iteration with diffusion synthetic acceleration (SI–DSA) enforces uniformly tight accuracy tolerances across all source iterations, thereby oversolving the early iterations, and it does not explicitly reuse angular bases from preceding iterations. More critically, like its full-rank counterpart, this approach may lose effectiveness in multiscale problems with strong material discontinuities. We address these limitations through two complementary developments. First, we introduce adaptive accuracy control into randomized-greedy low-rank SI–DSA, reducing intermediate ranks and computational cost while maintaining the accuracy required for convergence. A two-stage hybrid sampling strategy can provide further acceleration by switching to DEIM-based sampling near convergence, once the preceding angular basis becomes sufficiently representative. Second, we develop an inexact flexible GMRES–DSA solver for the integral scalar-flux reformulation, in which sweep-based low-rank approximations are confined to the construction of the right-hand side and the matrix–vector products. The scalar-flux Krylov basis is not compressed, thereby preserving Arnoldi orthogonality in exact arithmetic and allowing established inexact-GMRES analysis to guide adaptive accuracy control of low-rank operations. We present numerical results on benchmark problems that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.