No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we propose a new global analysis framework for a class of low-rank matrix recovery problems on the Riemannian manifold. We analyze the global behavior for the Riemannian optimization with random initialization. We use the Riemannian gradient descent algorithm to minimize a least squares loss function, and study the asymptotic behavior as well as the exact convergence rate. We reveal a previously unknown geometric property of the low-rank matrix manifold, which is the existence of spurious critical points for the simple least squares function on the manifold. We show that under some assumptions, the Riemannian gradient descent starting from a random initialization with high probability avoids these spurious critical points and only converges to the ground truth in nearly linear convergence rate, i.e. $mathcal{O}(text{log}(frac{1}{epsilon})+ text{log}(n))$ iterations to reach an $epsilon$-accurate solution. We use two applications as examples for our global analysis. The first one is a rank-1 matrix recovery problem. The second one is a generalization of the Gaussian phase retrieval problem. It only satisfies the weak isometry property, but has behavior similar to that of the first one except for an extra saddle set. Our convergence guarantee is nearly optimal and almost dimension-free, which fully explains the numerical observations. The global analysis can be potentially extended to other data problems with random measurement structures and empirical least squares loss functions.
We study the asymmetric low-rank factorization problem: [min_{mathbf{U} in mathbb{R}^{m times d}, mathbf{V} in mathbb{R}^{n times d}} frac{1}{2}|mathbf{U}mathbf{V}^top -mathbf{Sigma}|_F^2] where $mathbf{Sigma}$ is a given matrix of size $m times n$ and rank $d$. This is a canonical problem that admits two difficulties in optimization: 1) non-convexity and 2) non-smoothness (due to unbalancedness of $mathbf{U}$ and $mathbf{V}$). This is also a prototype for more complex problems such as asymmetric matrix sensing and matrix completion. Despite being non-convex and non-smooth, it has been observed empirically that the randomly initialized gradient descent algorithm can solve this problem in polynomial time. Existing theories to explain this phenomenon all require artificial modifications of the algorithm, such as adding noise in each iteration and adding a balancing regularizer to balance the $mathbf{U}$ and $mathbf{V}$. This paper presents the first proof that shows randomly initialized gradient descent converges to a global minimum of the asymmetric low-rank factorization problem with a polynomial rate. For the proof, we develop 1) a new symmetrization technique to capture the magnitudes of the symmetry and asymmetry, and 2) a quantitative perturbation analysis to approximate matrix derivatives. We believe both are useful for other related non-convex problems.
Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods are among the most widely used policy optimization algorithms in contemporary reinforcement learning. This class of methods is often applied in conjunction with entropy regularization -- an algorithmic scheme that encourages exploration -- and is closely related to soft policy iteration and trust region policy optimization. Despite the empirical success, the theoretical underpinnings for NPG methods remain limited even for the tabular setting. This paper develops $textit{non-asymptotic}$ convergence guarantees for entropy-regularized NPG methods under softmax parameterization, focusing on discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). Assuming access to exact policy evaluation, we demonstrate that the algorithm converges linearly -- or even quadratically once it enters a local region around the optimal policy -- when computing optimal value functions of the regularized MDP. Moreover, the algorithm is provably stable vis-`a-vis inexactness of policy evaluation. Our convergence results accommodate a wide range of learning rates, and shed light upon the role of entropy regularization in enabling fast convergence.
Natural gradient descent has proven effective at mitigating the effects of pathological curvature in neural network optimization, but little is known theoretically about its convergence properties, especially for emph{nonlinear} networks. In this work, we analyze for the first time the speed of convergence of natural gradient descent on nonlinear neural networks with squared-error loss. We identify two conditions which guarantee efficient convergence from random initializations: (1) the Jacobian matrix (of networks output for all training cases with respect to the parameters) has full row rank, and (2) the Jacobian matrix is stable for small perturbations around the initialization. For two-layer ReLU neural networks, we prove that these two conditions do in fact hold throughout the training, under the assumptions of nondegenerate inputs and overparameterization. We further extend our analysis to more general loss functions. Lastly, we show that K-FAC, an approximate natural gradient descent method, also converges to global minima under the same assumptions, and we give a bound on the rate of this convergence.
Tensors play a central role in many modern machine learning and signal processing applications. In such applications, the target tensor is usually of low rank, i.e., can be expressed as a sum of a small number of rank one tensors. This motivates us to consider the problem of low rank tensor recovery from a class of linear measurements called separable measurements. As specific examples, we focus on two distinct types of separable measurement mechanisms (a) Random projections, where each measurement corresponds to an inner product of the tensor with a suitable random tensor, and (b) the completion problem where measurements constitute revelation of a random set of entries. We present a computationally efficient algorithm, with rigorous and order-optimal sample complexity results (upto logarithmic factors) for tensor recovery. Our method is based on reduction to matrix completion sub-problems and adaptation of Leurgans method for tensor decomposition. We extend the methodology and sample complexity results to higher order tensors, and experimentally validate our theoretical results.
Existing results for low-rank matrix recovery largely focus on quadratic loss, which enjoys favorable properties such as restricted strong convexity/smoothness (RSC/RSM) and well conditioning over all low rank matrices. However, many interesting problems involve non-quadratic loss do not satisfy such properties; examples including one-bit matrix sensing, one-bit matrix completion, and rank aggregation. For these problems, standard nonconvex approaches such as projected gradient with rank constraint alone (a.k.a. iterative hard thresholding) and Burer-Monteiro approach may perform badly in practice and have no satisfactory theory in guaranteeing global and efficient convergence. In this paper, we show that the critical component in low-rank recovery with non-quadratic loss is a regularity projection oracle, which restricts iterates to low-rank matrix within an appropriate bounded set, over which the loss function is well behaved and satisfies a set of relaxed RSC/RSM conditions. Accordingly, we analyze an (averaged) projected gradient method equipped with such an oracle, and prove that it converges globally and linearly. Our results apply to a wide range of non-quadratic problems including rank aggregation, one bit matrix sensing/completion, and more broadly generalized linear models with rank constraint.