Fiber-Sampled Stochastic Mirror Descent for Tensor Decomposition with β-Divergence

Abstract

Canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) has been a workhorse for multimodal data analytics. This work puts forth a stochastic algorithmic framework for CPD under β-divergence, which is well-motivated in statistical learning—where the Euclidean distance is typically not preferred. Despite the existence of a series of prior works addressing this topic, pressing computational and theoretical challenges, e.g., scalability and convergence issues, still remain. In this paper, a unified stochastic mirror descent framework is developed for large-scale β-divergence CPD. Our key contribution is the integrated design of a tensor fiber sampling strategy and a flexible stochastic Bregman divergence-based mirror descent iterative procedure, which significantly reduces the computation and memory cost per iteration for various β. Leveraging the fiber sampling scheme and the multilinear algebraic structure of low-rank tensors, the proposed lightweight algorithm also ensures global convergence to a stationary point under mild conditions. Numerical results on synthetic and real data show that our framework attains significant computational saving compared with state-of-the-art methods.