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arXiv:1811.03813

The trouble with tensor ring decompositions

Kim Batselier

Published Nov 9, 2018• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The tensor train decomposition decomposes a tensor into a "train" of 3-way tensors that are interconnected through the summation of auxiliary indices. The decomposition is stable, has a well-defined notion of rank and enables the user to perform various linear algebra operations on vectors and matrices of exponential size in a computationally efficient manner. The tensor ring decomposition replaces the train by a ring through the introduction of one additional auxiliary variable. This article discusses a major issue with the tensor ring decomposition: its inability to compute an exact minimal-rank decomposition from a decomposition with sub-optimal ranks. Both the contraction operation and Hadamard product are motivated from applications and it is shown through simple examples how the tensor ring-rounding procedure fails to retrieve minimal-rank decompositions with these operations. These observations, together with the already known issue of not being able to find a best low-rank tensor ring approximation to a given tensor indicate that the applicability of tensor rings is severely limited.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1811.03813

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The tensor train decomposition decomposes a tensor into a "train" of 3-way tensors that are interconnected through the summation of auxiliary indices. The decomposition is stable, has a well-defined notion of rank and enables the user to perform various linear algebra operations on vectors and matrices of exponential size in a computationally efficient manner. The tensor ring decomposition replaces the train by a ring through the introduction of one additional auxiliary variable. This article discusses a major issue with the tensor ring decomposition: its inability to compute an exact minimal-rank decomposition from a decomposition with sub-optimal ranks. Both the contraction operation and Hadamard product are motivated from applications and it is shown through simple examples how the tensor ring-rounding procedure fails to retrieve minimal-rank decompositions with these operations. These observations, together with the already known issue of not being able to find a best low-rank tensor ring approximation to a given tensor indicate that the applicability of tensor rings is severely limited.
A simple nonrecursive form of the tensor decomposition in d dimensions is presented. It does not inherently suffer from the curse of dimensionality, it has asymptotically the same number of parameters as the canonical decomposition, but it is stable and its computation is based on low-rank approximation of auxiliary unfolding matrices. The new form gives a clear and convenient way to implement all basic operations efficiently. A fast rounding procedure is presented, as well as basic linear algebra operations. Examples showing the benefits of the decomposition are given, and the efficiency is demonstrated by the computation of the smallest eigenvalue of a 19-dimensional operator.
This dissertation reviews classical vector - tensor analysis, building up to the necessary techniques required to decompose a tensor into a tensor train and to reconstruct it back into the original tensor with minimal error. The tensor train decomposition decomposes a tensor of dimensionality d into a train of d third order tensors, whose sizes are dependent upon the rank and chosen error bound. I will be reviewing the required operations of matricization, tensor - matrix, vector and tensor multiplication to be able to compute this decomposition. I then move onto analysing the tensor train decomposition by ap-plying it to different types of tensor, of differing dimensionality with a variety of accuracy bounds to investigate their influence on the time taken to complete the decomposition and the final absolute error. Finally I explore a method to compute a d-dimensional integration from the tensor train, which will allow larger tensors to be integrated with the memory required dramatically reduced after the tensor is decomposed. I will be applying this technique to two tensors with different ranks and compare the efficiency and accuracy of integrating directly from the tensor to that of the tensor train decomposition.
Tensor-train (TT) decomposition has gained tremendous popularity due to its efficiency in handling high-dimensional data arising in scientific and quantum computing as well as machine learning applications. It provides a compact representation of matrices and vectors with a Kronecker product-like low-rank structure, and hence enables efficient matrix-vector operations in this compressed form. The vector scalar product is among such key operations, comprising a series of tensor contractions in a specific TT network where the order of contractions significantly impacts the computational cost. In this work, we introduce fast algorithms for finding a near-optimal contraction ordering for such networks. We show that our algorithms find such contraction orderings efficiently, outperforming the ordering methods for general tensor networks. Compared to our approaches, the best existing method incurs a higher cost of up to 15% for xTy, twice for xTAy, and more than ten times for xTABy scalar products, where A and B are matrices expressed in TT format.
Abstract Tensor decompositions such as the canonical format and the tensor train format have been widely utilized to reduce storage costs and operational complexities for high‐dimensional data, achieving linear scaling with the input dimension instead of exponential scaling. In this paper, we investigate even lower storage‐cost representations in the tensor ring format, which is an extension of the tensor train format with variable end‐ranks. Firstly, we introduce two algorithms for converting a tensor in full format to tensor ring format with low storage cost. Secondly, we detail a rounding operation for tensor rings and show how this requires new definitions of common linear algebra operations in the format to obtain storage‐cost savings. Lastly, we introduce algorithms for transforming the graph structure of graph‐based tensor formats, with orders of magnitude lower complexity than existing literature. The efficiency of all algorithms is demonstrated on a number of numerical examples, and in certain cases, we demonstrate significantly higher compression ratios when compared to previous approaches to using the tensor ring format.
We discuss extended definitions of linear and multilinear operations such as Kronecker, Hadamard, and contracted products, and establish links between them for tensor calculus. Then we introduce effective low-rank tensor approximation techniques including Candecomp/Parafac (CP), Tucker, and tensor train (TT) decompositions with a number of mathematical and graphical representations. We also provide a brief review of mathematical properties of the TT decomposition as a low-rank approximation technique. With the aim of breaking the curse-of-dimensionality in large-scale numerical analysis, we describe basic operations on large-scale vectors, matrices, and high-order tensors represented by TT decomposition. The proposed representations can be used for describing numerical methods based on TT decomposition for solving large-scale optimization problems such as systems of linear equations and symmetric eigenvalue problems.
Using the matrix product state (MPS) representation of the recently proposed tensor ring (TR) decompositions, in this paper we propose a TR completion algorithm, which is an alternating minimization algorithm that alternates over the factors in the MPS representation. This development is motivated in part by the success of matrix completion algorithms that alternate over the (low-rank) factors. We propose a novel initialization method and analyze the computational complexity of the TR completion algorithm. The numerical comparison between the TR completion algorithm and the existing algorithms that employ a low rank tensor train (TT) approximation for data completion shows that our method outperforms the existing ones for a variety of real computer vision settings, and thus demonstrates the improved expressive power of tensor ring as compared to tensor train.