Related papers: Improved Global Guarantees for the Nonconvex Burer…
We consider using gradient descent to minimize the nonconvex function $f(X)=\phi(XX^{T})$ over an $n\times r$ factor matrix $X$, in which $\phi$ is an underlying smooth convex cost function defined over $n\times n$ matrices. While only a…
This work considers two popular minimization problems: (i) the minimization of a general convex function $f(\mathbf{X})$ with the domain being positive semi-definite matrices; (ii) the minimization of a general convex function…
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…
We study a general matrix optimization problem with a fixed-rank positive semidefinite (PSD) constraint. We perform the Burer-Monteiro factorization and consider a particular Riemannian quotient geometry in a search space that has a total…
We address the rectangular matrix completion problem by lifting the unknown matrix to a positive semidefinite matrix in higher dimension, and optimizing a nonconvex objective over the semidefinite factor using a simple gradient descent…
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…
We study the projected gradient descent method on low-rank matrix problems with a strongly convex objective. We use the Burer-Monteiro factorization approach to implicitly enforce low-rankness; such factorization introduces non-convexity in…
Matrix factorization is a popular approach for large-scale matrix completion. The optimization formulation based on matrix factorization can be solved very efficiently by standard algorithms in practice. However, due to the non-convexity…
Rank minimization is of interest in machine learning applications such as recommender systems and robust principal component analysis. Minimizing the convex relaxation to the rank minimization problem, the nuclear norm, is an effective…
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 semidefinite programs (SDPs) with equality constraints. The variable to be optimized is a positive semidefinite matrix $X$ of size $n$. Following the Burer--Monteiro approach, we optimize a factor $Y$ of size $n \times p$…
We study a nonconvex optimization algorithmic approach to phase retrieval and the more general problem of semidefinite low-rank matrix sensing. Specifically, we analyze the nonconvex landscape of a quartic Burer-Monteiro factored…
The orthogonal group synchronization problem, which focuses on recovering orthogonal group elements from their corrupted pairwise measurements, encompasses examples such as high-dimensional Kuramoto model on general signed networks,…
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…
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…
This paper studies the role of over-parametrization in solving non-convex optimization problems. The focus is on the important class of low-rank matrix sensing, where we propose an infinite hierarchy of non-convex problems via the lifting…
Most existing methodologies of estimating low-rank matrices rely on Burer-Monteiro factorization, but these approaches can suffer from slow convergence, especially when dealing with solutions characterized by a large condition number,…
We consider the problem of recovering low-rank matrices from random rank-one measurements, which spans numerous applications including covariance sketching, phase retrieval, quantum state tomography, and learning shallow polynomial neural…
A rank-$r$ matrix $X \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ can be written as a product $U V^\top$, where $U \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times r}$ and $V \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times r}$. One could exploit this observation in optimization: e.g., consider the…
This paper studies noisy low-rank matrix completion: given partial and noisy entries of a large low-rank matrix, the goal is to estimate the underlying matrix faithfully and efficiently. Arguably one of the most popular paradigms to tackle…