Joint Majorization-Minimization for Nonnegative CP and Tucker Decompositions under $β$-Divergences: Unfolding-Free Updates

Abstract: We study majorization-minimization methods for nonnegative tensor decompositions under the $β$-divergence family, focusing on nonnegative CP and Tucker models. Our aim is to avoid explicit mode unfoldings and large auxiliary matrices by deriving separable surrogates whose multiplicative updates can be implemented using only tensor contractions (einsum-style operations). We present both classical block-MM updates in contraction-only form and a joint majorization strategy, inspired by joint MM for matrix $β$-NMF, that reuses cached reference quantities across inexpensive inner updates. We prove tightness of the proposed majorizers, establish monotonic decrease of the objective, and show convergence of the sequence of objective values; we also discuss how BSUM theory applies to the block-MM scheme for analyzing limit points. Finally, experiments on synthetic tensors and the Uber spatiotemporal count tensor demonstrate substantial speedups over unfolding-based baselines and a recent einsum-factorization framework.