Prof-K: Probabilistic One-Pass Filtering for Efficient Top-k Selection

Top-k selection is a fundamental computational primitive with applications spanning databases, information retrieval, signal processing, and modern machine learning workloads, including sparse activations and attention pruning. As data sizes grow, existing approaches become inefficient: exact methods incur high memory and compute overhead, while approximate methods often rely on brittle heuristics that degrade under adversarial or heavy-tailed inputs. In this paper, we introduce Prof-K, a fast, scalable, and distribution-agnostic algorithm for exact top-k selection. Prof-K performs a single-pass filtering procedure: a small random sample estimates an adaptive threshold, the N input elements are streamed once into a compact buffer, and an exact top-k routine on this buffer recovers the true top-k elements on the first attempt with probability at least 1-varepsilon, where varepsilon>0 is user specified. We derive high-probability guarantees for correctness and buffer size, together with an approximately optimal sample size that minimizes overhead as a function of N and k. Empirically, Prof-K achieves 1.5x-15x speedups over the highly optimized PyTorch topk and recent RadiK implementations, with the largest gains in the large-scale, small-to-moderate-k regime where prior methods struggle most. Unlike previous approaches, these guarantees hold independently of the input distribution, ensuring robustness to adversarial settings. A run-time check detects the rare failures and triggers a retry, so the returned set is always exact and varepsilon bounds only the probability of requiring an additional pass. We further demonstrate its impact on training BatchTopK Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), where top-k selection constitutes a significant portion of the training cost.