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.

本研究论文首次证明了初始化的随机梯度下降算法可以在多项式时间内收敛到具有对称和非对称特点的低秩矩阵分解问题的全局最小值，该证明基于新的对称化技术和定量扰动分析方法，并可以拓展到其他相关的非凸问题。

不对称低秩矩阵分解的梯度下降全局收敛性