NeurIPS 2026 Papers

Hartigan's $k$-means algorithm has theoretical advantages over the standard Lloyd's variant, which has become synonymous with ``$k$-means''. Yet, Hartigan's algorithm is far slower in practice due to its inherently sequential calculations. We devise a Batched Hartigan's method that enables vectorized calculation by exploiting the triangle inequality to expose a set of parallel-safe updates and a smaller set of sequential updates. This makes Hartigan's method competitive with Lloyd's in execution speed for the first time.