Preconditioned Gradient Descent for Overparameterized Nonconvex Burer–Monteiro Factorization with Global Optimality Certification

We consider using gradient descent to minimize the nonconvex function $f(X)=\phi(XX^{T})$ over an $n\times r$ factor matrix $X$, in which $\phi$ is an underlying smooth convex cost function defined over $n\times n$ matrices. While only a second-order stationary point $X$ can be provably found in reasonable time, if $X$ is additionally \emph{rank deficient}, then its … Read more