Nearly Sparse Linear Algebra

In this article, we propose a method to perform linear algebra on a matrix with nearly sparse properties. More precisely, although we require the main part of the matrix to be sparse, we allow some dense columns with possibly large coefficients. We modify Block Wiedemann algorithm and show that the contribution of these heavy columns can be made negligible compared to the one of the sparse part of the matrix. In particular, this eases the computation of discrete logarithms in medium and high characteristic finite fields, where nearly sparse matrices naturally appear.