Related papers: Nonconvex Matrix Factorization is Geodesically Con…

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…

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…

We study the non-convex matrix factorization approach to matrix completion via Riemannian geometry. Based on an optimization formulation over a Grassmannian manifold, we characterize the landscape based on the notion of principal angles…

We propose a general theory for studying the \xl{landscape} of nonconvex \xl{optimization} with underlying symmetric structures \tz{for a class of machine learning problems (e.g., low-rank matrix factorization, phase retrieval, and deep…

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…

We consider minimizing a twice-differentiable, $L$-smooth, and $\mu$-strongly convex objective $\phi$ over an $n\times n$ positive semidefinite matrix $M\succeq0$, under the assumption that the minimizer $M^{\star}$ has low rank…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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,…

Motivated by the problem of learning a linear regression model whose parameter is a large fixed-rank non-symmetric matrix, we consider the optimization of a smooth cost function defined on the set of fixed-rank matrices. We adopt the…

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…

We study nonconvex optimization landscapes for learning overcomplete representations, including learning (i) sparsely used overcomplete dictionaries and (ii) convolutional dictionaries, where these unsupervised learning problems find many…

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…

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…

We study first-order optimization algorithms for computing the barycenter of Gaussian distributions with respect to the optimal transport metric. Although the objective is geodesically non-convex, Riemannian GD empirically converges…

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…

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…