cs.LGJul 15, 2026

An Efficient Newton Algorithm for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with the Kullback-Leibler Divergence

Authors: Damien LesensJérémy E. CohenBora Uçar

Organizations: ENS de Lyon · Univ. Lyon, INSA-Lyon, UCBL, UJM, CNRS, Inserm, CREATIS UMR 5220, U1294, F-69621, Lyon, France. · CNRS and LIP (UMR5668, Université de Lyon - ENS de Lyon - UCBL - CNRS - Inria), 46 allée d'Italie, Lyon, France.

Abstract

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a fundamental tool in unsupervised learning, which approximates a nonnegative matrix by the product of two low-rank nonnegative factors. The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is best suited to measure the data to model discrepancy when the decomposed data sample follows a Poisson distribution, which is the case for count datasets such as term-document matrices or images. Most KL-NMF algorithms in the literature minimize a separable majorant of the loss to find their next iterate. We argue that this method has reached its limits and propose to use instead the second-order Taylor expansion of the loss, leading to a Newton-type method. We minimize this non-separable surrogate by proposing a generalization of the well-known HALS algorithm. This yields an efficient KL-NMF algorithm which provably converges and which competes favorably with state-of-the-art algorithms on a large variety of datasets.

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