Convergence of Alternating Gradient Descent for Matrix Factorization

We consider alternating gradient descent (AGD) with fixed step size applied to the asymmetric matrix factorization objective. Experiments suggest that our proposed initialization is not merely of theoretical benefit, but rather significantly improves the convergence rate of gradient descent in practice. Our proof is conceptually simple: a uniform Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality and uniform Lipschitz smoothness constant are guaranteed for a sufficient number of iterations, starting from our random initialization. Our proof method should be useful for extending and simplifying convergence analyses for a broader class of nonconvex low-rank factorization problems.