Convolution Quadrature with Adaptive History Compression for Variable-Order Fractional Reaction--Diffusion Equations

We develop a fully implicit fast method for semilinear variable-order fractional reaction–diffusion equations with periodic fractional diffusion and exponential-transition Scarpi memory. A Volterra-resolvent analysis establishes local well-posedness and temporal regularity estimates that describe the weak initial singularity. Backward Euler convolution quadrature combined with Fourier pseudospectral discretization achieves mesh-uniform stability and positive-time first-order convergence. To accelerate the scheme, we utilize Cauchy–FFT weight recovery and adaptive blockwise sum-of-exponentials compression, which significantly reduces the cost of history evaluation under local error control. A logarithmic perturbation bound quantifies the effects of weight recovery, history compression, and inexact nonlinear solves, giving tolerance conditions that preserve the convergence order. Numerical experiments confirm the first-order accuracy and demonstrate that the accelerated method efficiently resolves long-time spatial patterns at a substantially reduced computational cost.