Riemannian Optimization for Hadamard Products of Low-Rank Matrices

Abstract: The elementwise Hadamard product of two low-rank matrices provides a parameter-efficient model for data with multiplicative structure, but its modeling is challenging due to the presence of additional symmetries under coupled row/column scalings between the two factors. In order to leverage the geometry of the space, we formulate the learning of such matrices as optimization on a Riemannian quotient manifold. We propose a novel block-diagonal Riemannian metric derived from the pullback of the Frobenius inner product. The metric is shown to be invariant under the full symmetry group. We develop a Riemannian gradient descent algorithm that uses a tuning-free Gauss--Newton step size and scales linearly in the number of observed entries per iteration. Experiments on real and synthetic datasets illustrate the efficacy of our proposed Riemannian approach.