Extended Gauss-Newton and Gauss-Newton-ADMM Algorithms for Low-Rank Matrix Optimization

We develop a generic Gauss-Newton (GN) framework for solving a class of nonconvex optimization problems involving low-rank matrix variables. As opposed to standard Gauss-Newton method, our framework allows one to handle general smooth convex cost function via its surrogate. The main complexity-per-iteration consists of the inverse of two rank-size matrices and at most six small matrix multiplications to compute a closed form Gauss-Newton direction, and a backtracking linesearch. We show, under mild conditions, that the proposed algorithm globally and locally converges to a stationary point of the original nonconvex problem. We also show empirically that the Gauss-Newton algorithm achieves much higher accurate solutions compared to the well studied alternating direction method (ADM). Then, we specify our Gauss-Newton framework to handle the symmetric case and prove its convergence, where ADM is not applicable without lifting variables. Next, we incorporate our Gauss-Newton scheme into the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to design a GN-ADMM algorithm for solving the low-rank optimization problem. We prove that, under mild conditions and a proper choice of the penalty parameter, our GN-ADMM globally converges to a stationary point of the original problem. Finally, we apply our algorithms to solve several problems in practice such as low-rank approximation, matrix completion, robust low-rank matrix recovery, and matrix recovery in quantum tomography. The numerical experiments provide encouraging results to motivate the use of nonconvex optimization.