Zheng‐Hai Huang

Shenglong Hu, Zheng-Hai Huang, Liqun Qi

In this paper, we introduce a new class of nonnegative tensors --- strictly nonnegative tensors. A weakly irreducible nonnegative tensor is a strictly nonnegative tensor but not vice versa. We show that the spectral radius of a strictly nonnegative tensor is always positive. We give some sufficient and necessary conditions for the six well-conditional classes of nonnegative tensors, introduced in the literature, and a full relationship picture about strictly nonnegative tensors with these six classes of nonnegative tensors. We then establish global R-linear convergence of a power method for finding the spectral radius of a nonnegative tensor under the condition of weak irreducibility. We show that for a nonnegative tensor T, there always exists a partition of the index set such that every tensor induced by the partition is weakly irreducible; and the spectral radius of T can be obtained from those spectral radii of the induced tensors. In this way, we develop a convergent algorithm for finding the spectral radius of a general nonnegative tensor without any additional assumption. The preliminary numerical results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Kai-Xin Gao, Xiao-Lei Liu, Zheng-Hai Huang et al.

Using second-order optimization methods for training deep neural networks (DNNs) has attracted many researchers. A recently proposed method, Eigenvalue-corrected Kronecker Factorization (EKFAC) (George et al., 2018), proposes an interpretation of viewing natural gradient update as a diagonal method, and corrects the inaccurate re-scaling factor in the Kronecker-factored eigenbasis. Gao et al. (2020) considers a new approximation to the natural gradient, which approximates the Fisher information matrix (FIM) to a constant multiplied by the Kronecker product of two matrices and keeps the trace equal before and after the approximation. In this work, we combine the ideas of these two methods and propose Trace-restricted Eigenvalue-corrected Kronecker Factorization (TEKFAC). The proposed method not only corrects the inexact re-scaling factor under the Kronecker-factored eigenbasis, but also considers the new approximation method and the effective damping technique proposed in Gao et al. (2020). We also discuss the differences and relationships among the Kronecker-factored approximations. Empirically, our method outperforms SGD with momentum, Adam, EKFAC and TKFAC on several DNNs.

Kai-Xin Gao, Xiao-Lei Liu, Zheng-Hai Huang et al.

Second-order optimization methods have the ability to accelerate convergence by modifying the gradient through the curvature matrix. There have been many attempts to use second-order optimization methods for training deep neural networks. Inspired by diagonal approximations and factored approximations such as Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (KFAC), we propose a new approximation to the Fisher information matrix (FIM) called Trace-restricted Kronecker-factored Approximate Curvature (TKFAC) in this work, which can hold the certain trace relationship between the exact and the approximate FIM. In TKFAC, we decompose each block of the approximate FIM as a Kronecker product of two smaller matrices and scaled by a coefficient related to trace. We theoretically analyze TKFAC's approximation error and give an upper bound of it. We also propose a new damping technique for TKFAC on convolutional neural networks to maintain the superiority of second-order optimization methods during training. Experiments show that our method has better performance compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms on some deep network architectures.

Zhenghai Huang, Liqun Qi

In this paper, we consider higher order paired symmetric tensors and strongly paired symmetric tensors. Elasticity tensors and higher order elasticity tensors in solid mechanics are strongly paired symmetric tensors. A (strongly) paired symmetric tensor is said to be positive definite if the homogeneous polynomial defined by it is positive definite. Positive definiteness of elasticity and higher order elasticity tensors is strong ellipticity in solid mechanics, which plays an important role in nonlinear elasticity theory. We mainly investigate positive definiteness of fourth order three dimensional and sixth order three dimensional (strongly) paired symmetric tensors. We first show that the concerned (strongly) paired symmetric tensor is positive definite if and only if its smallest $M$-eigenvalue is positive. Second, we propose several necessary and sufficient conditions under which the concerned (strongly) paired symmetric tensor is positive definite. Third, we study the conditions under which the homogeneous polynomial defined by a fourth order three dimensional or sixth order three dimensional (strongly) paired symmetric tensor can be written as a sum of squares of polynomials, and further, propose several necessary and/or sufficient conditions to judge whether the concerned (strongly) paired symmetric tensors are positive definite or not. Fourth, by using semidefinite relaxation we propose a sequential semidefinite programming method to compute the smallest $M$-eigenvalue of a fourth order three dimensional (strongly) paired symmetric tensor, by which we can check positive definiteness of the concerned tensor. The preliminary numerical results demonstrate that our method is effective.

Min Zhang, Lei Yang, Zheng-Hai Huang

The problem of recovering a low $n$-rank tensor is an extension of sparse recovery problem from the low dimensional space (matrix space) to the high dimensional space (tensor space) and has many applications in computer vision and graphics such as image inpainting and video inpainting. In this paper, we consider a new tensor recovery model, named as minimum $n$-rank approximation (MnRA), and propose an appropriate iterative hard thresholding algorithm with giving the upper bound of the $n$-rank in advance. The convergence analysis of the proposed algorithm is also presented. Particularly, we show that for the noiseless case, the linear convergence with rate $\frac{1}{2}$ can be obtained for the proposed algorithm under proper conditions. Additionally, combining an effective heuristic for determining $n$-rank, we can also apply the proposed algorithm to solve MnRA when $n$-rank is unknown in advance. Some preliminary numerical results on randomly generated and real low $n$-rank tensor completion problems are reported, which show the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.