Related papers: Improved Global Guarantees for the Nonconvex Burer…

We propose greedy and local search algorithms for rank-constrained convex optimization, namely solving $\underset{\mathrm{rank}(A)\leq r^*}{\min}\, R(A)$ given a convex function $R:\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ and a…

We study the robust recovery of a low-rank matrix from sparsely and grossly corrupted Gaussian measurements, with no prior knowledge on the intrinsic rank. We consider the robust matrix factorization approach. We employ a robust $\ell_1$…

We present a novel efficient theoretical and numerical framework for solving global non-convex polynomial optimization problems. We analytically demonstrate that such problems can be efficiently reformulated using a non-linear objective…

Low rank approximation is a commonly occurring problem in many computer vision and machine learning applications. There are two common ways of optimizing the resulting models. Either the set of matrices with a given rank can be explicitly…

Convergence guarantees for optimization over bounded-rank matrices are delicate to obtain because the feasible set is a non-smooth and non-convex algebraic variety. Existing techniques include projected gradient descent, fixed-rank…

We study a family of (potentially non-convex) constrained optimization problems with convex composite structure. Through a novel analysis of non-smooth geometry, we show that proximal-type algorithms applied to exact penalty formulations of…

Optimization problems with rank constraints arise in many applications, including matrix regression, structured PCA, matrix completion and matrix decomposition problems. An attractive heuristic for solving such problems is to factorize the…

Trace norm regularization is a widely used approach for learning low rank matrices. A standard optimization strategy is based on formulating the problem as one of low rank matrix factorization which, however, leads to a non-convex problem.…

We propose an algorithm for solving nonlinear convex programs defined in terms of a symmetric positive semidefinite matrix variable $X$. This algorithm rests on the factorization $X=Y Y^T$, where the number of columns of Y fixes the rank of…

Many applications require recovering a matrix of minimal rank within an affine constraint set, with matrix completion a notable special case. Because the problem is NP-hard in general, it is common to replace the matrix rank with the…

We study a generalized nonconvex Burer-Monteiro formulation for low-rank minimization problems. We use recent results on non-Euclidean first order methods to provide efficient and scalable algorithms. Our approach uses geometries induced by…

We propose a new majorization-minimization (MM) method for non-smooth and non-convex programs, which is general enough to include the existing MM methods. Besides the local majorization condition, we only require that the difference between…

We propose a general technique for improving alternating optimization (AO) of nonconvex functions. Starting from the solution given by AO, we conduct another sequence of searches over subspaces that are both meaningful to the optimization…

Substantial progress has been made recently on developing provably accurate and efficient algorithms for low-rank matrix factorization via nonconvex optimization. While conventional wisdom often takes a dim view of nonconvex optimization…

We study the asymmetric matrix factorization problem under a natural nonconvex formulation with arbitrary overparametrization. The model-free setting is considered, with minimal assumption on the rank or singular values of the observed…

There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…

For smooth optimization problems with a Hermitian positive semi-definite fixed-rank constraint, we consider three existing approaches including the simple Burer--Monteiro method, and Riemannian optimization over quotient geometry and the…

Consider a semidefinite program (SDP) involving an $n\times n$ positive semidefinite matrix $X$. The Burer-Monteiro method uses the substitution $X=Y Y^T$ to obtain a nonconvex optimization problem in terms of an $n\times p$ matrix $Y$.…

This paper develops a new class of nonconvex regularizers for low-rank matrix recovery. Many regularizers are motivated as convex relaxations of the matrix rank function. Our new factor group-sparse regularizers are motivated as a…

This paper studies the relationship between the nuclear norm-regularized minimization problem, which minimizes the sum of a $C^2$ function $h$ and a positive multiple of the nuclear norm, denoted by $f$, and its factorized problem obtained…