Related papers: Improved Global Guarantees for the Nonconvex Burer…
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…
The orthogonal group synchronization problem, which aims to recover a set of $d \times d$ orthogonal matrices from their pairwise noisy products, plays a fundamental role in signal processing, computer vision, and network analysis. In…
We consider semidefinite programs (SDPs) of size n with equality constraints. In order to overcome scalability issues, Burer and Monteiro proposed a factorized approach based on optimizing over a matrix Y of size $n$ by $k$ such that $X =…
This work proposes a rapid algorithm, BM-Global, for nuclear-norm-regularized convex and low-rank matrix optimization problems. BM-Global efficiently decreases the objective value via low-cost steps leveraging the nonconvex but smooth…
Tensor optimization is crucial to massive machine learning and signal processing tasks. In this paper, we consider tensor optimization with a convex and well-conditioned objective function and reformulate it into a nonconvex optimization…
Semidefinite programming (SDP) with diagonal constraints arise in many optimization problems, such as Max-Cut, community detection and group synchronization. Although SDPs can be solved to arbitrary precision in polynomial time, generic…
Optimization over low rank matrices has broad applications in machine learning. For large scale problems, an attractive heuristic is to factorize the low rank matrix to a product of two much smaller matrices. In this paper, we study the…
In this paper, we study the general problem of optimizing a convex function $F(L)$ over the set of $p \times p$ matrices, subject to rank constraints on $L$. However, existing first-order methods for solving such problems either are too…
We propose a simple, scalable, and fast gradient descent algorithm to optimize a nonconvex objective for the rank minimization problem and a closely related family of semidefinite programs. With $O(r^3 \kappa^2 n \log n)$ random…
Motivated by an application in computational biology, we consider low-rank matrix factorization with $\{0,1\}$-constraints on one of the factors and optionally convex constraints on the second one. In addition to the non-convexity shared…
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…
Semidefinite programs (SDP) are important in learning and combinatorial optimization with numerous applications. In pursuit of low-rank solutions and low complexity algorithms, we consider the Burer--Monteiro factorization approach for…
In practical instances of nonconvex matrix factorization, the rank of the true solution $r^{\star}$ is often unknown, so the rank $r$ of the model can be overspecified as $r>r^{\star}$. This over-parameterized regime of matrix factorization…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function so that along the iterations the objective function decreases. Such a simple principle allows to solve a large…
This work studies low-rank approximation of a positive semidefinite matrix from partial entries via nonconvex optimization. We characterized how well local-minimum based low-rank factorization approximates a fixed positive semidefinite…
This paper considers the global geometry of general low-rank minimization problems via the Burer-Monterio factorization approach. For the rank-$1$ case, we prove that there is no spurious second-order critical point for both symmetric and…
Recently, convex formulations of low-rank matrix factorization problems have received considerable attention in machine learning. However, such formulations often require solving for a matrix of the size of the data matrix, making it…
Techniques involving factorization are found in a wide range of applications and have enjoyed significant empirical success in many fields. However, common to a vast majority of these problems is the significant disadvantage that the…
Low-rank matrix recovery is a fundamental problem in signal processing and machine learning. A recent very popular approach to recovering a low-rank matrix X is to factorize it as a product of two smaller matrices, i.e., X = UV^T, and then…
This work investigates the geometry of a nonconvex reformulation of minimizing a general convex loss function $f(X)$ regularized by the matrix nuclear norm $\|X\|_*$. Nuclear-norm regularized matrix inverse problems are at the heart of many…