Improved Global Guarantees for the Nonconvex Burer--Monteiro Factorization via Rank Overparameterization

Understand

We consider minimizing a twice-differentiable, $L$-smooth, and $\mu$-strongly convex objective $\phi$ over an $n\times n$ positive semidefinite matrix $M\succeq0$, under the assumption that the minimizer $M^{\star}$ has low rank $r^{\star}\ll n$.

• Following the Burer--Monteiro approach, we instead minimize the nonconvex objective $f(X)=\phi(XX^{T})$ over a factor matrix $X$ of size $n\times r$.
• This substantially reduces the number of variables from $O(n^{2})$ to as few as $O(n)$ and also enforces positive semidefiniteness for free, but at the cost of giving up the convexity of the original problem.
• In this paper, we prove that if the search rank $r\ge r^{\star}$ is overparameterized by a \emph{constant factor} with respect to the true rank $r^{\star}$, namely as in $r>\frac{1}{4}(L/\mu-1)^{2}r^{\star}$, then despite nonconvexity, local optimization is guaranteed to globally converge from any initial point to the global optimum.