Scaling and Scalability: Provable Nonconvex Low-Rank Tensor Completion
Tian Tong, Cong Ma, Ashley Prater-Bennette, Erin Tripp, Yuejie Chi
Abstract
Tensors, which provide a powerful and flexible model for representing multi-attribute data and multi-way interactions, play an indispensable role in modern data science across various fields in science and engineering. A fundamental task is tensor completion, which aims to faithfully recover the tensor from a small subset of its entries in a statistically and computationally efficient manner. Harnessing the low-rank structure of tensors in the Tucker decomposition, this paper develops a scaled gradient descent (ScaledGD) algorithm to directly recover the tensor factors with tailored spectral initializations, and shows that it provably converges at a linear rate independent of the condition number of the ground truth tensor for tensor completion as soon as the sample size is above the order of $n^{3/2}$ ignoring other parameter dependencies, where $n$ is the dimension of the tensor. To the best of our knowledge, ScaledGD is the first algorithm that achieves near-optimal statistical and computational complexities simultaneously for low-rank tensor completion with the Tucker decomposition. Our algorithm highlights the power of appropriate preconditioning in accelerating nonconvex statistical estimation, where the iteration-varying preconditioners promote desirable invariance properties of the trajectory with respect to the underlying symmetry in low-rank tensor factorization.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v151-tong22a,
title = { Scaling and Scalability: Provable Nonconvex Low-Rank Tensor Completion },
author = {Tong, Tian and Ma, Cong and Prater-Bennette, Ashley and Tripp, Erin and Chi, Yuejie},
booktitle = {Proceedings of The 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
pages = {2607--2617},
year = {2022},
editor = {Camps-Valls, Gustau and Ruiz, Francisco J. R. and Valera, Isabel},
volume = {151},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {28--30 Mar},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v151/tong22a/tong22a.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v151/tong22a.html},
abstract = { Tensors, which provide a powerful and flexible model for representing multi-attribute data and multi-way interactions, play an indispensable role in modern data science across various fields in science and engineering. A fundamental task is tensor completion, which aims to faithfully recover the tensor from a small subset of its entries in a statistically and computationally efficient manner. Harnessing the low-rank structure of tensors in the Tucker decomposition, this paper develops a scaled gradient descent (ScaledGD) algorithm to directly recover the tensor factors with tailored spectral initializations, and shows that it provably converges at a linear rate independent of the condition number of the ground truth tensor for tensor completion as soon as the sample size is above the order of $n^{3/2}$ ignoring other parameter dependencies, where $n$ is the dimension of the tensor. To the best of our knowledge, ScaledGD is the first algorithm that achieves near-optimal statistical and computational complexities simultaneously for low-rank tensor completion with the Tucker decomposition. Our algorithm highlights the power of appropriate preconditioning in accelerating nonconvex statistical estimation, where the iteration-varying preconditioners promote desirable invariance properties of the trajectory with respect to the underlying symmetry in low-rank tensor factorization. }
}