Minimal basis for set of binary vectors using XOR I would be surprised if this isn't a well-studied problem, but I'm not sure what else to search for at this point: you're given a set of binary $n$-vectors $S \subset \{0,1\}^n$. The problem is to find another set of binary $n$-vectors $B \subset \{0,1\}^n$, with minimal size $|B|$, such that every vector in $S$ can be expressed by the XOR results of some subset of $B$ (so $B$ is essentially a basis for $S$ using XOR instead of addition and allowing only binary coefficients in the linear combination).

In a way, this is a form of PCA for binary vectors. While searching for literature on this problem, I came across the Discrete Basis Problem also discussed in this PhD thesis, which seems closely related. Instead of XOR it uses OR, and here $|B|$ is an additional input (and the task is it to minimise the error in representing $S$ with vectors from $B$). This problem is NP-hard. Does the same apply to the problem I've presented above, or is there an efficient solution? Any pointers to existing literature would be much appreciated.
If you treat your vectors as over the field $GF(2)$ rather than over the set $\{0,1\}$, then what you ask is to find a basis for the span of a set of vectors. This is a well-studied problem in linear algebra, which you probably know the solution for. (One option is Gaussian elimination.)