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Fix L2 expanded distance clamp for cutlass and legacy fused backend - #2841

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aamijar wants to merge 13 commits into
NVIDIA:mainfrom
aamijar:fix-spectral-clustering-flaky
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aamijar wants to merge 13 commits into
NVIDIA:mainfrom
aamijar:fix-spectral-clustering-flaky

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@aamijar

@aamijar aamijar commented Oct 12, 2026 •

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Resolves #2094. Resolves #1632

This PR resolves the spectral clustering flaky test on ARM A100 cuda 12.2. It also solves the brute force returning wrong distances issue from #1632.

When root-causing the issue, I found that running:
our spectral embedding + sklearn kmeans works
our spectral embedding + our kmeans doens't work

It turns out that switching the backend of our kmeans from cutlass to the unfused path worked fine. The reason is that the cutlass path clamps distances to zero when the distances are below a certain threshold and the norms are equal. This can cause genuine small positive distances to be zero and in our case cause all points to be assigned to one cluster during spectral clustering.

We should remove the clamping and only clamp if the distance is negative (since L2 distance can't be negative). This is consistent with how the other backends work. For instance, unfused and the new cutile 1nn path.

I was able to reproduce locally on ARM A100 cuda 12.2 with and without this PR:
Current main: fails around 5-8% of the time
With this fix: passes 1000/1000 times.
This PR achieves perfect ARI score of 1 for all the gtests. This wasn't generally the case before.

Summary of changes

  • Remove equal-norm based clamping

  • For easily known self-neighbors like same X and Y inputs for pairwise_distances, set the diagonal to zero.

  • Add regression test (from flaky SpectralClustering scenario) from Make the L2 expanded self-distance clamp relative to the norms #2794

  • When comparing self-neighbors (same vector against same vector) the distance will not be zero (because we are no longer clamping in this PR). Doing the sqrt on a small number will increase the error. We can loosen the threshold on the go test. We still expect the correct indices to be returned.

  • However, because we aren't aggressively clamping the distances, we can expect improved relative ordering between very close neighbors, which solves [BUG] Brute Force returns wrong distances #1632.

  • The recommendation should be if users absolutely need self-neighbors to be zero, then they may run a processing step themselves to refine the distances from the set of returned neighbors (i.e. set same neighbors to be zero).

  • The changes in this PR affects the L2SqrtExpanded metric and codepaths for Kmeans (cutlass & legacy fused backend only), and brute_force. Other indexes like CAGRA and IVF-PQ during search time use their own distance kernels and not this path.

  • Aligns the L2SqrtExpanded clamp to be the same as the other kmeans backends like cutile and unfused.

@aamijar
aamijar requested a review from a team as a code owner October 12, 2026 15:37
@aamijar aamijar self-assigned this Oct 12, 2026
@aamijar aamijar added non-breaking Introduces a non-breaking change bug Something isn't working labels Oct 12, 2026
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  • cpp/src/distance/detail/distance.cuh

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📝 Summary

Summary by CodeRabbit

  • Bug Fixes
    • Expanded L2 distances are clamped to zero when calculations produce negative values, including when square-root output is requested.
    • For self-comparisons with positive dimensions, diagonal distances are set to zero for row-major layouts and for square matrices in other layouts.

The expanded L2 epilogues clamp negative results to zero. When both input pointers match and the dimensions and layout meet the stated conditions, the expanded L2 path writes finalized zero values to diagonal entries.

Changes: Expanded L2 distance handling

Layer / File(s) Summary
Clamp expanded L2 values
cpp/src/distance/detail/distance_ops/l2_exp.cuh
Both epilogues clamp negative expanded-distance results to zero. The CUTLASS epilogue applies the optional square root after clamping. The precision helper and prior self-neighbor corrections are removed.
Set matching-input diagonal distances
cpp/src/distance/detail/distance.cuh
A CUDA kernel applies the final operation to zero and writes the result to diagonal entries. The expanded L2 path launches it when the input pointers are identical, both dimensions are positive, and the layout is row-major or the dimensions are equal.

Priority: ➖ Normal

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Change: Bug fix · Severity of issue fixed: Low

Suggested reviewers: cjnolet

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to 9bc27

No actionable merge-blocking issue remains from this review. Merge after normal checks.

Pre-merge checks: Passed 5
Check name Status Explanation
Linked Issues check Passed Issue [#2094] reports a flaky spectral clustering test and gives no additional coding acceptance criteria. The PR removes the tolerance-based clamp that can convert small positive expanded L2 distance…
Out of Scope Changes check Passed The changes in cpp/src/distance/detail/distance_ops/l2_exp.cuh and cpp/src/distance/detail/distance.cuh support the L2 distance behavior used by the flaky spectral clustering test in [#2094]. The …
Docstring Coverage Passed No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0…
Title check Passed The title clearly and concisely describes the main change: fixing the L2 expanded-distance clamp in the Cutlass and legacy fused backends.
Description check Passed The description is directly related to the changeset. It explains the clamp behavior, the spectral clustering issue, the diagonal correction, affected backends, and validation results.
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Actionable comments posted: 1


  • 🪄 Fix CodeRabbit comments on this PR
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Inline comments:
Review comments at @cpp/src/distance/detail/distance_ops/l2_exp.cuh:
- Around line 26-28: Update both expanded-L2 clamps in the distance computation
and accumulation path so they replace only negative values with zero and
preserve NaN values; locate the clamps by their outVal and acc[i][j]
assignments. Keep the existing square-root behavior unchanged.

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  • cpp/src/distance/detail/distance_ops/l2_exp.cuh

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Comment thread cpp/src/distance/detail/distance_ops/l2_exp.cuh
@github-project-automation github-project-automation Bot moved this from Needs Review to Approved in Unstructured Data Processing Oct 13, 2026
Comment on lines +29 to +37
template <typename OutT, typename AccT, typename FinOpT, typename IdxT>
RAFT_KERNEL set_self_distances_kernel(OutT* out,
IdxT diagonal_size,
IdxT leading_dimension,
FinOpT fin_op)
{
IdxT idx = static_cast<IdxT>(blockIdx.x) * blockDim.x + threadIdx.x;
if (idx < diagonal_size) { out[std::size_t(idx) * leading_dimension + idx] = fin_op(AccT{0}, 0); }
}

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I was trying to use alternative primitives like raft::matrix::set_diagonal, but that requires a temporary allocation and copy, whereas we should just be able to write in place. I also looked into raft::map, raft::map_offset, and raft::unary_op but they require that we write to every element of out.

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[CI] CLUSTER_TEST spectral flaky [BUG] Brute Force returns wrong distances

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