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Practical and Fast Momentum-Based Power Methods
Proceedings of the 2nd Mathematical and Scientific Machine Learning Conference, PMLR 145:721-756, 2022.
Abstract
The power method is a classical algorithm with broad applications in machine learning tasks, in- cluding streaming PCA, spectral clustering, and low-rank matrix approximation. The distilled pur- pose of the vanilla power method is to determine the largest eigenvalue (in absolute modulus) and its eigenvector of a matrix. A momentum-based scheme can be used to accelerate the power method, but achieving an optimal convergence rate with existing algorithms critically relies on additional spectral information that is unavailable at run-time, and sub-optimal initializations can result in di- vergence. In this paper, we provide a pair of novel momentum-based power methods, which we call the delayed momentum power method (DMPower) and a streaming variant, the delayed momentum streaming method (DMStream). Our methods leverage inexact deflation and are capable of achiev- ing near-optimal convergence with far less restrictive hyperparameter requirements. We provide convergence analyses for both algorithms through the lens of perturbation theory. Further, we ex- perimentally demonstrate that DMPower routinely outperforms the vanilla power method and that both algorithms match the convergence speed of an oracle running existing accelerated methods with perfect spectral knowledge.