Complete Dictionary Recovery over the Sphere II: Recovery by Riemannian Trust-region Method

Abstract

We consider the problem of recovering a complete (i.e., square and invertible) matrix $A_0$, from $Y$ with $Y = A_0 X_0$, provided $X_0$ is sufficiently sparse. This recovery problem is central to theoretical understanding of dictionary learning, which seeks a sparse representation for a collection of input signals and finds numerous applications in modern signal processing and machine learning. We give the first efficient algorithm that provably recovers $A_0$ when $X_0$ has $O(n)$ nonzeros per column, under suitable probability model for $X_0$. Our algorithmic pipeline centers around solving a certain nonconvex optimization problem with a spherical constraint, and hence is naturally phrased in the language of manifold optimization. In a companion paper, we have showed that with high probability, our nonconvex formulation has no “spurious” local minimizers and around any saddle point, the objective function has a negative directional curvature. In this paper, we take advantage of the particular geometric structure and describe a Riemannian trust region algorithm that provably converges to a local minimizer with from arbitrary initializations. Such minimizers give excellent approximations to the rows of $X_0$. The rows are then recovered by a linear programming rounding and deflation.

Publication
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 63(2): 853 - 884, Feb. 2017