Related papers: General Low-rank Matrix Optimization: Geometric An…
When solving large scale semidefinite programs that admit a low-rank solution, an efficient heuristic is the Burer-Monteiro factorization: instead of optimizing over the full matrix, one optimizes over its low-rank factors. This reduces the…
Nonconvex matrix recovery is known to contain no spurious local minima under a restricted isometry property (RIP) with a sufficiently small RIP constant $\delta$. If $\delta$ is too large, however, then counterexamples containing spurious…
This paper studies the nonsmooth optimization landscape of the $\ell_1$-norm rank-one symmetric matrix factorization problem using tools from second-order variational analysis. Specifically, as the main finding of this paper, we show that…
This paper is concerned with low-rank matrix optimization, which has found a wide range of applications in machine learning. This problem in the special case of matrix sensing has been studied extensively through the notion of Restricted…
This paper considers the minimization of a general objective function $f(X)$ over the set of rectangular $n\times m$ matrices that have rank at most $r$. To reduce the computational burden, we factorize the variable $X$ into a product of…
The restricted isometry property (RIP) is a well-known condition that guarantees the absence of spurious local minima in low-rank matrix recovery problems with linear measurements. In this paper, we introduce a novel property named bound…
Low-rank matrix recovery is well-known to exhibit benign nonconvexity under the restricted isometry property (RIP): every second-order critical point is globally optimal, so local methods provably recover the ground truth. Motivated by the…
In this paper, we study a general low-rank matrix recovery problem with linear measurements corrupted by some noise. The objective is to understand under what conditions on the restricted isometry property (RIP) of the problem local search…
Recent work established that rank overparameterization eliminates spurious local minima in nonconvex low-rank matrix recovery under the restricted isometry property (RIP). But this does not fully explain the practical success of…
We consider MaxCut-type semidefinite programs (SDP) which admit a low rank solution. To numerically leverage the low rank hypothesis, a standard algorithmic approach is the Burer-Monteiro factorization, which allows to significantly reduce…
In this paper we develop a new framework that captures the common landscape underlying the common non-convex low-rank matrix problems including matrix sensing, matrix completion and robust PCA. In particular, we show for all above problems…
We study the optimization landscape of deep linear neural networks with the square loss. It is known that, under weak assumptions, there are no spurious local minima and no local maxima. However, the existence and diversity of non-strict…
We study the problem of decomposing a polynomial $p$ into a sum of $r$ squares by minimizing a quadratically penalized objective $f_p(\mathbf{u}) = \left\lVert \sum_{i=1}^r u_i^2 - p\right\lVert^2$. This objective is nonconvex and is…
We show that there are no spurious local minima in the non-convex factorized parametrization of low-rank matrix recovery from incoherent linear measurements. With noisy measurements we show all local minima are very close to a global…
Low-rank factorization is a standard way to make structured optimization problems in machine learning more tractable by replacing matrix variables with compact factors. For positive semidefinite (PSD) variables, the symmetric…
Low-rank matrix recovery can be solved to statistical optimality by convex matrix optimization under the classical assumption of restricted isometry property (RIP). However, for large problems, the convex formulation is commonly replaced by…
This paper considers general rank-constrained optimization problems that minimize a general objective function $f(X)$ over the set of rectangular $n\times m$ matrices that have rank at most $r$. To tackle the rank constraint and also to…
Matrix sensing problems exhibit pervasive non-convexity, plaguing optimization with a proliferation of suboptimal spurious solutions. Avoiding convergence to these critical points poses a major challenge. This work provides new theoretical…
We show that solutions to the popular convex matrix LASSO problem (nuclear-norm--penalized linear least-squares) have low rank under similar assumptions as required by classical low-rank matrix sensing error bounds. Although the purpose of…
When the linear measurements of an instance of low-rank matrix recovery satisfy a restricted isometry property (RIP)---i.e. they are approximately norm-preserving---the problem is known to contain no spurious local minima, so exact recovery…