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arXiv:1907.05568 · International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

A Quantum-inspired Classical Algorithm for Separable Non-negative Matrix Factorization

Zhihuai Chen, Yinan Li, Xiaoming Sun, Pei Yuan, Jialin Zhang

Published Jul 28, 2019• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) asks to decompose a (entry-wise) non-negative matrix into the product of two smaller-sized nonnegative matrices, which has been shown intractable in general. In order to overcome this issue, separability assumption is introduced which assumes all data points are in a conical hull. This assumption makes NMF tractable and widely used in text analysis and image processing, but still impractical for huge-scale datasets. In this paper, inspired by recent development on dequantizing techniques, we propose a new classical algorithm for separable NMF problem. Our new algorithm runs in polynomial time in the rank and logarithmic in the size of input matrices, which achieves an exponential speedup in the low-rank setting.

DOI
10.24963/ijcai.2019/627

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Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) asks to decompose a (entry-wise) non-negative matrix into the product of two smaller-sized nonnegative matrices, which has been shown intractable in general. In order to overcome this issue, separability assumption is introduced which assumes all data points are in a conical hull. This assumption makes NMF tractable and widely used in text analysis and image processing, but still impractical for huge-scale datasets. In this paper, inspired by recent development on dequantizing techniques, we propose a new classical algorithm for separable NMF problem. Our new algorithm runs in polynomial time in the rank and logarithmic in the size of input matrices, which achieves an exponential speedup in the low-rank setting.
It is NP-complete to find non-negative factors W and H with fixed rank r from a non-negative matrix X by minimizing ||X-WH^Τ ||^2. Although the separability assumption (all data points are in the conical hull of the extreme rows) enables polynomial-time algorithms, the computational cost is not affordable for big data. This paper investigates how the power of quantum computation can be capitalized to solve the non-negative matrix factorization with the separability assumption (SNMF) by devising a quantum algorithm based on the divide-and-conquer anchoring (DCA) scheme [Zhou et al., 2013]. The design of quantum DCA (QDCA) is challenging. In the divide step, the random projections in DCA is completed by a quantum algorithm for linear operations, which achieves the exponential speedup. We then devise a heuristic post-selection procedure which extracts the information of anchors stored in the quantum states efficiently. Under a plausible assumption, QDCA performs efficiently, achieves the quantum speedup, and is beneficial for high dimensional problems.
Among matrix decomposition methods, the two factorized matrices obtained by Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) generally yield a more natural and interpretable representations. It is computationally expensive to find the two factorized matrices W and H with a fixed rank r from a non-negative matrix X∈Rn⇥m by minimizing ||X-WH^Τ ||^2. Even if the proposed separability assumption enables polynomial separable NMF (SNMF) algorithms, the computational cost is not affordable for the continuously growing big data. As a powerful technique to deal with high dimensional data, quantum computing possesses quantum advantages for solving machine learning problems, at which the quantum advantages include both an exponential speedup and a more efficient learning ability with respect to the classical counterparts. In this research, based on the divide-and-conquer anchoring (DCA) scheme, quantum DCA (QDCA) is devised to solve SNMF problems. Benefiting from the linear algebraic nature of quantum mechanics and the convenience that statistical distribution is natively available in quantum mechanics with a superset, QDCA achieves an exponential speedup with respect to the classical counterpart. The runtime complexity is O(poly log(n + m)), where n x m is the size of the input matrix. In addition, the proposed QDCA can naturally generalize to solve near-separable NMF under a polynomial logarithmic runtime. Specifically, the time consuming divide step can be completed by a quantum algorithm for linear operations with an exponential speedup. In the conquer step, considering that reading out quantum data into classical forms is exponential expensive and attributing to that anchors can be sampled with a high probability from a probability distribution in the resulting quantum states, the proposed heuristic post-selection method enables QDCA to extract information from quantum states efficiently, which also maintains the quantum speedup after measurements. Under a plausible assumption, QDCA performs efficiently, achieves the exponential speedup, and is beneficial for high dimensional problems. The QDCA is a hybrid quantum and classical algorithm that maintains the quantum speedup after measurements, which provides a new way to develop quantum machine learning algorithms.
We present an algorithmic framework for quantum-inspired classical algorithms on close-to-low-rank matrices, generalizing the series of results started by Tang’s breakthrough quantum-inspired algorithm for recommendation systems [STOC’19]. Motivated by quantum linear algebra algorithms and the quantum singular value transformation (SVT) framework of Gilyén et al. [STOC’19], we develop classical algorithms for SVT that run in time independent of input dimension, under suitable quantum-inspired sampling assumptions. Our results give compelling evidence that in the corresponding QRAM data structure input model, quantum SVT does not yield exponential quantum speedups. Since the quantum SVT framework generalizes essentially all known techniques for quantum linear algebra, our results, combined with sampling lemmas from previous work, suffices to generalize all recent results about dequantizing quantum machine learning algorithms. In particular, our classical SVT framework recovers and often improves the dequantization results on recommendation systems, principal component analysis, supervised clustering, support vector machines, low-rank regression, and semidefinite program solving. We also give additional dequantization results on low-rank Hamiltonian simulation and discriminant analysis. Our improvements come from identifying the key feature of the quantum-inspired input model that is at the core of all prior quantum-inspired results: ℓ2-norm sampling can approximate matrix products in time independent of their dimension. We reduce all our main results to this fact, making our exposition concise, self-contained, and intuitive.
Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a matrix decomposition problem with applications in unsupervised learning. The general form of this problem (along with many of its variants) is NP-hard in nature. In our work, we explore how this problem could be solved with an energy-based optimization method suitable for certain machines with non-von Neumann architectures. We used the Dirac-3, a device based on the entropy computing paradigm and made by Quantum Computing Inc., to evaluate our approach. Our formulations consist of (i) a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization model (QUBO, suitable for Ising machines) and a quartic formulation that allows for real-valued and integer variables (suitable for machines like the Dirac-3). Although current devices cannot solve large NMF problems, the results of our preliminary experiments are promising enough to warrant further research. For non-negative real matrices, we observed that a fusion approach of first using Dirac-3 and then feeding its results as the initial factor matrices to Scikit-learn's NMF procedure outperforms Scikit-learn's NMF procedure on its own, with default parameters in terms of the error in the reconstructed matrices. For our experiments on non-negative integer matrices, we compared the Dirac-3 device to Google's CP-SAT solver (inside the Or-Tools package) and found that for serial processing, Dirac-3 outperforms CP-SAT in a majority of the cases. We believe that future work in this area might be able to identify domains and variants of the problem where entropy computing (and other non-von Neumann architectures) could offer a clear advantage.
We present an algorithmic framework for quantum-inspired classical algorithms on close-to-low-rank matrices, generalizing the series of results started by Tang’s breakthrough quantum-inspired algorithm for recommendation systems [STOC’19]. Motivated by quantum linear algebra algorithms and the quantum singular value transformation (SVT) framework of Gilyén et al. [STOC’19], we develop classical algorithms for SVT that run in time independent of input dimension, under suitable quantum-inspired sampling assumptions. Our results give compelling evidence that in the corresponding QRAM data structure input model, quantum SVT does not yield exponential quantum speedups. Since the quantum SVT framework generalizes essentially all known techniques for quantum linear algebra, our results, combined with sampling lemmas from previous work, suffice to generalize all prior results about dequantizing quantum machine learning algorithms. In particular, our classical SVT framework recovers and often improves the dequantization results on recommendation systems, principal component analysis, supervised clustering, support vector machines, low-rank regression, and semidefinite program solving. We also give additional dequantization results on low-rank Hamiltonian simulation and discriminant analysis. Our improvements come from identifying the key feature of the quantum-inspired input model that is at the core of all prior quantum-inspired results: ℓ 2 -norm sampling can approximate matrix products in time independent of their dimension. We reduce all our main results to this fact, making our exposition concise, self-contained, and intuitive.
A wide range of fundamental machine learning tasks that are addressed by the maximum a posteriori estimation can be reduced to a general minimum conical hull problem.The best-known solution to tackle general minimum conical hull problems is the divide-and-conquer anchoring learning scheme (DCA), whose runtime complexity is polynomial in size.However, big data are pushing these polynomial algorithms to their performance limits.In this paper, we propose a sublinear classical algorithm to tackle general minimum conical hull problems when the input has stored in a sample-based low-overhead data structure.The algorithm's runtime complexity is polynomial in the rank and polylogarithmic in size.The proposed algorithm achieves the exponential speedup over DCA and, therefore, provides advantages for high-dimensional problems.