add a vector to all rows of a matrix

These solutions using outer() or collapse::TRA() are is significantly faster than using rep or sweep.

We can use col to replicate the 'a' elements

b + a[col(b)]
#     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
#[1,]    2    3    1    1    1
#[2,]    2    3    1    1    1
#[3,]    2    3    1    1    1
#[4,]    2    3    1    1    1
#[5,]    2    3    1    1    1
#[6,]    2    3    1    1    1

Or a faster option would be to use rep

b + rep(a, each = nrow(b))

---

Or use sweep

sweep(b, 2, a, "+")

Benchmarks

set.seed(24)
b <- matrix(sample(0:9, 8000*5000, replace=TRUE), ncol=5000)
a <- sample(0:3, 5000, replace=TRUE)
system.time(b + a[col(b)])
#  user  system elapsed 
#  1.08    0.06    1.14 
system.time(b + rep(a, each = nrow(b)))
#   user  system elapsed 
#   0.83    0.03    0.86 

system.time(t(a+t(b)))
#   user  system elapsed 
#   1.14    0.03    1.17 

system.time(sweep(b, 2, a, "+"))
#  user  system elapsed 
#  0.62    0.06    0.69