Abstract. The dqds algorithm computes all the singular values of an n-by-n bidiagonal matrix to high relative accuracy in O(n 2 ) cost. Its efficient implementation is now available as a LAPACK subroutine and is the preferred algorithm for this purpose. In this paper we incorporate into dqds a technique called aggressive early deflation, which has been applied successfully to the Hessenberg QR algorithm. Extensive numerical experiments show that aggressive early deflation often reduces the dqds runtime significantly. In addition, our theoretical analysis suggests that with aggressive early deflation, the performance of dqds is largely independent of the shift strategy. We confirm through experiments that the zero-shift version is often as fast as the shifted version. We give a detailed error analysis to prove that with our proposed deflation strategy, dqds computes all the singular values to high relative accuracy.Key words. aggressive early deflation, dqds, singular values, bidiagonal matrix AMS subject classifications. 65F15, 15A181. Introduction. The differential quotient difference with shifts (dqds) algorithm computes all the singular values of an n-by-n bidiagonal matrix to high relative accuracy in O(n 2 ) cost [11]. Its efficient implementation has been developed and is now available as a LAPACK subroutine DLASQ [30]. Because of its guaranteed relative accuracy and efficiency, dqds has now replaced the QR algorithm [7], which had been the default algorithm to compute the singular values of a bidiagonal matrix. The standard way of computing the singular values of a general matrix is to first apply suitable orthogonal transformations to reduce the matrix to bidiagonal form, then use dqds [6]. dqds is also a major computational kernel in the MRRR algorithm for computing orthogonal eigenvectors of a symmetric tridiagonal matrix [8,9,10] and the singular value decomposition of a bidiagonal matrix [35] in O(n 2 ) cost. The aggressive early deflation strategy, introduced in [5], is known to greatly improve the performance of the Hessenberg QR algorithm for computing the eigenvalues of a general square matrix by deflating converged eigenvalues long before a conventional deflation strategy does. The primary contribution of this paper is the proposal of two deflation strategies for dqds based on aggressive early deflation. The first strategy is a direct specialization of aggressive early deflation to dqds. The second strategy, which takes full advantage of the bidiagonal structure of the matrix, is computationally more efficient. We present a detailed mixed forward-backward stability analysis that proves the second strategy guarantees high relative accuracy of all the computed singular values. The results of extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that performing aggressive early deflation significantly reduces the solution time of dqds in many cases. We observed speedups of up to a factor 50, and in all our experiments the second strategy was at least as fast as DLASQ for any matrix larger than 3000.