BZPEERReading, trust and collaboration for research
Menu

Discover

GraphFollow connections around a paper, topic or saved view.

Workspaces

HomePick up where your research flow left off.InboxHandle requests, replies and notifications from one place.CollectionsCurate reading lists, evidence sets and shareable dossiers.ResearchSee your private provenance graph, trail and imports.CollaborationMove from discovery into focused discussion rooms.PublishDraft, preview and publish full-text research articles.

Network

ExpertsFind specialists worth following or asking for help.CommunitiesJoin research circles organized around shared work.PartnersSee external organizations active around the same topics.

Opportunities

ListingsBrowse roles, calls and collaborations with clearer fit signals.

Account

Log inReturn to your reading and collaboration workspace.Create accountStart saving work, following people and joining teams.
Log inCreate account

Researcher profile

Nicolas Gillis

Nicolas Gillis contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
math.OCMachine LearningNumerical Analysismath.NAeess.SPComputational Engineering, Finance, and ScienceComputer Visioneess.ASeess.IVSound

Trust snapshot

Quick read

Trust 21 - EmergingVerification L1Unclaimed author
15works
0followers
10topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Decide how to stay connected

Follow researcher0

Identity and collaboration

How to connect with this researcher

Claiming links this public author record to a researcher profile and unlocks direct collaboration workflows.

Log in to claim

Direct collaboration

Open a focused conversation when the fit is right

Claim this author entity first to unlock direct invitations.

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent work, topics, institutions and collaborators without jumping out to a separate graph page.

Building this graph slice

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

15 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Supervised Deep Multimodal Matrix Factorization for Interpretable Brain Network Analysis

We present Supervised Deep Multimodal Matrix Factorization (SD3MF), an interpretable framework for integrative brain network analysis that generalizes Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Tri-Factorization (SNMTF) from unsupervised single-graph clustering to supervised prediction over populations of multimodal graphs. SD3MF learns deep hierarchical factorizations for each modality together with a shared latent representation that aligns subjects across views. An encoder-decoder formulation jointly optimizes graph reconstruction and supervised prediction, while adaptive weights enable data-driven multimodal fusion. By representing each subject through community-level interaction matrices, the model yields interpretable and discriminative features. Experiments on multimodal connectome datasets show that SD3MF consistently outperforms strong deep learning baselines such as CNNs and GNNs, while enabling biologically interpretable insights. Code for reproducibility is available at: https://github.com/amjadseyedi/SD3MF.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Multiplicative Updates for NMF with $β$-Divergences under Disjoint Equality Constraints

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is the problem of approximating an input nonnegative matrix, $V$, as the product of two smaller nonnegative matrices, $W$ and $H$. In this paper, we introduce a general framework to design multiplicative updates (MU) for NMF based on $β$-divergences ($β$-NMF) with disjoint equality constraints, and with penalty terms in the objective function. By disjoint, we mean that each variable appears in at most one equality constraint. Our MU satisfy the set of constraints after each update of the variables during the optimization process, while guaranteeing that the objective function decreases monotonically. We showcase this framework on three NMF models, and show that it competes favorably the state of the art: (1)~$β$-NMF with sum-to-one constraints on the columns of $H$, (2) minimum-volume $β$-NMF with sum-to-one constraints on the columns of $W$, and (3) sparse $β$-NMF with $\ell_2$-norm constraints on the columns of $W$.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Solving matrix nearness problems via Hamiltonian systems, matrix factorization, and optimization

In these lectures notes, we review our recent works addressing various problems of finding the nearest stable system to an unstable one. After the introduction, we provide some preliminary background, namely, defining Port-Hamiltonian systems and dissipative Hamiltonian systems and their properties, briefly discussing matrix factorizations, and describing the optimization methods that we will use in these notes. In the third chapter, we present our approach to tackle the distance to stability for standard continuous linear time invariant (LTI) systems. The main idea is to rely on the characterization of stable systems as dissipative Hamiltonian systems. We show how this idea can be generalized to compute the nearest $Ω$-stable matrix, where the eigenvalues of the sought system matrix $A$ are required to belong a rather general set $Ω$. We also show how these ideas can be used to compute minimal-norm static feedbacks, that is, stabilize a system by choosing a proper input $u(t)$ that linearly depends on $x(t)$ (static-state feedback), or on $y(t)$ (static-output feedback). In the fourth chapter, we present our approach to tackle the distance to passivity. The main idea is to rely on the characterization of stable systems as port-Hamiltonian systems. We also discuss in more details the special case of computing the nearest stable matrix pairs. In the last chapter, we focus on discrete-time LTI systems. Similarly as for the continuous case, we propose a parametrization that allows efficiently compute the nearest stable system (for matrices and matrix pairs), allowing to compute the distance to stability. We show how this idea can be used in data-driven system identification, that is, given a set of input-output pairs, identify the system $A$.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Block Alternating Bregman Majorization Minimization with Extrapolation

In this paper, we consider a class of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems whose objective is the sum of a block relative smooth function and a proper and lower semicontinuous block separable function. Although the analysis of block proximal gradient (BPG) methods for the class of block $L$-smooth functions have been successfully extended to Bregman BPG methods that deal with the class of block relative smooth functions, accelerated Bregman BPG methods are scarce and challenging to design. Taking our inspiration from Nesterov-type acceleration and the majorization-minimization scheme, we propose a block alternating Bregman Majorization-Minimization framework with Extrapolation (BMME). We prove subsequential convergence of BMME to a first-order stationary point under mild assumptions, and study its global convergence under stronger conditions. We illustrate the effectiveness of BMME on the penalized orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization problem.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Distributionally Robust and Multi-Objective Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a linear dimensionality reduction technique for analyzing nonnegative data. A key aspect of NMF is the choice of the objective function that depends on the noise model (or statistics of the noise) assumed on the data. In many applications, the noise model is unknown and difficult to estimate. In this paper, we define a multi-objective NMF (MO-NMF) problem, where several objectives are combined within the same NMF model. We propose to use Lagrange duality to judiciously optimize for a set of weights to be used within the framework of the weighted-sum approach, that is, we minimize a single objective function which is a weighted sum of the all objective functions. We design a simple algorithm based on multiplicative updates to minimize this weighted sum. We show how this can be used to find distributionally robust NMF (DR-NMF) solutions, that is, solutions that minimize the largest error among all objectives, using a dual approach solved via a heuristic inspired from the Frank-Wolfe algorithm. We illustrate the effectiveness of this approach on synthetic, document and audio data sets. The results show that DR-NMF is robust to our incognizance of the noise model of the NMF problem.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

On the non-symmetric semidefinite Procrustes problem

In this paper, we consider the non-symmetric positive semidefinite Procrustes (NSPSDP) problem: Given two matrices $X,Y \in \mathbb{R}^{n,m}$, find the matrix $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n,n}$ that minimizes the Frobenius norm of $AX-Y$ and which is such that $A+A^T$ is positive semidefinite. We generalize the semi-analytical approach for the symmetric positive semidefinite Procrustes problem, where $A$ is required to be positive semidefinite, that was proposed by Gillis and Sharma (A semi-analytical approach for the positive semidefinite Procrustes problem, Linear Algebra Appl. 540, 112-137, 2018). As for the symmetric case, we first show that the NSPSDP problem can be reduced to a smaller NSPSDP problem that always has a unique solution and where the matrix $X$ is diagonal and has full rank. Then, an efficient semi-analytical algorithm to solve the NSPSDP problem is proposed, solving the smaller and well-posed problem with a fast gradient method which guarantees a linear rate of convergence. This algorithm is also applicable to solve the complex NSPSDP problem, where $X,Y \in \mathbb{C}^{n,m}$, as we show the complex NSPSDP problem can be written as an overparametrized real NSPSDP problem. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is illustrated on several numerical examples.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

A block inertial Bregman proximal algorithm for nonsmooth nonconvex problems with application to symmetric nonnegative matrix tri-factorization

We propose BIBPA, a block inertial Bregman proximal algorithm for minimizing the sum of a block relatively smooth function (that is, relatively smooth concerning each block) and block separable nonsmooth nonconvex functions. We prove that the sequence generated by BIBPA subsequentially converges to critical points of the objective under standard assumptions, and globally converges when the objective function is additionally assumed to satisfy the Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz (KŁ) property. We also provide the convergence rate when the objective satisfies the Łojasiewicz inequality. We apply BIBPA to the symmetric nonnegative matrix tri-factorization (SymTriNMF) problem, where we propose kernel functions for SymTriNMF and provide closed-form solutions for subproblems of BIBPA.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Blind Audio Source Separation with Minimum-Volume Beta-Divergence NMF

Considering a mixed signal composed of various audio sources and recorded with a single microphone, we consider on this paper the blind audio source separation problem which consists in isolating and extracting each of the sources. To perform this task, nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) based on the Kullback-Leibler and Itakura-Saito $β$-divergences is a standard and state-of-the-art technique that uses the time-frequency representation of the signal. We present a new NMF model better suited for this task. It is based on the minimization of $β$-divergences along with a penalty term that promotes the columns of the dictionary matrix to have a small volume. Under some mild assumptions and in noiseless conditions, we prove that this model is provably able to identify the sources. In order to solve this problem, we propose multiplicative updates whose derivations are based on the standard majorization-minimization framework. We show on several numerical experiments that our new model is able to obtain more interpretable results than standard NMF models. Moreover, we show that it is able to recover the sources even when the number of sources present into the mixed signal is overestimated. In fact, our model automatically sets sources to zero in this situation, hence performs model order selection automatically.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Inertial Block Proximal Methods for Non-Convex Non-Smooth Optimization

We propose inertial versions of block coordinate descent methods for solving non-convex non-smooth composite optimization problems. Our methods possess three main advantages compared to current state-of-the-art accelerated first-order methods: (1) they allow using two different extrapolation points to evaluate the gradients and to add the inertial force (we will empirically show that it is more efficient than using a single extrapolation point), (2) they allow to randomly picking the block of variables to update, and (3) they do not require a restarting step. We prove the subsequential convergence of the generated sequence under mild assumptions, prove the global convergence under some additional assumptions, and provide convergence rates. We deploy the proposed methods to solve non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and show that they compete favorably with the state-of-the-art NMF algorithms. Additional experiments on non-negative approximate canonical polyadic decomposition, also known as non-negative tensor factorization, are also provided.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Off-diagonal Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization (symNMF) is a variant of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) that allows to handle symmetric input matrices and has been shown to be particularly well suited for clustering tasks. In this paper, we present a new model, dubbed off-diagonal symNMF (ODsymNMF), that does not take into account the diagonal entries of the input matrix in the objective function. ODsymNMF has three key advantages compared to symNMF. First, ODsymNMF is theoretically much more sound as there always exists an exact factorization of size at most $\nicefrac{n(n-1)}{2}$ where $n$ is the dimension of the input matrix. Second, it makes more sense in practice as diagonal entries of the input matrix typically correspond to the similarity between an item and itself, not bringing much information. Third, it makes the optimization problem much easier to solve. In particular, it will allow us to design an algorithm based on coordinate descent that minimizes the component-wise $\ell_1$ norm between the input matrix and its approximation. We prove that this norm is much better suited for binary input matrices often encountered in practice. We also derive a coordinate descent method for the component-wise $\ell_2$ norm, and compare the two approaches with symNMF on synthetic and document data sets.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

On a minimum enclosing ball of a collection of linear subspaces

This paper concerns the minimax center of a collection of linear subspaces. When the subspaces are $k$-dimensional subspaces of $\mathbb{R}^n$, this can be cast as finding the center of a minimum enclosing ball on a Grassmann manifold, Gr$(k,n)$. For subspaces of different dimension, the setting becomes a disjoint union of Grassmannians rather than a single manifold, and the problem is no longer well-defined. However, natural geometric maps exist between these manifolds with a well-defined notion of distance for the images of the subspaces under the mappings. Solving the initial problem in this context leads to a candidate minimax center on each of the constituent manifolds, but does not inherently provide intuition about which candidate is the best representation of the data. Additionally, the solutions of different rank are generally not nested so a deflationary approach will not suffice, and the problem must be solved independently on each manifold. We propose and solve an optimization problem parametrized by the rank of the minimax center. The solution is computed using a subgradient algorithm on the dual. By scaling the objective and penalizing the information lost by the rank-$k$ minimax center, we jointly recover an optimal dimension, $k^*$, and a central subspace, $U^* \in$ Gr$(k^*,n)$ at the center of the minimum enclosing ball, that best represents the data.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Sparse Separable Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

We propose a new variant of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), combining separability and sparsity assumptions. Separability requires that the columns of the first NMF factor are equal to columns of the input matrix, while sparsity requires that the columns of the second NMF factor are sparse. We call this variant sparse separable NMF (SSNMF), which we prove to be NP-complete, as opposed to separable NMF which can be solved in polynomial time. The main motivation to consider this new model is to handle underdetermined blind source separation problems, such as multispectral image unmixing. We introduce an algorithm to solve SSNMF, based on the successive nonnegative projection algorithm (SNPA, an effective algorithm for separable NMF), and an exact sparse nonnegative least squares solver. We prove that, in noiseless settings and under mild assumptions, our algorithm recovers the true underlying sources. This is illustrated by experiments on synthetic data sets and the unmixing of a multispectral image.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

Algorithms and Comparisons of Non-negative Matrix Factorization with Volume Regularization for Hyperspectral Unmixing

In this work, we consider nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with a regularization that promotes small volume of the convex hull spanned by the basis matrix. We present highly efficient algorithms for three different volume regularizers, and compare them on endmember recovery in hyperspectral unmixing. The NMF algorithms developed in this work are shown to outperform the state-of-the-art volume-regularized NMF methods, and produce meaningful decompositions on real-world hyperspectral images in situations where endmembers are highly mixed (no pure pixels). Furthermore, our extensive numerical experiments show that when the data is highly separable, meaning that there are data points close to the true endmembers, and there are a few endmembers, the regularizer based on the determinant of the Gramian produces the best results in most cases. For data that is less separable and/or contains more endmembers, the regularizer based on the logarithm of the determinant of the Gramian performs best in general.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

Near-Convex Archetypal Analysis

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a widely used linear dimensionality reduction technique for nonnegative data. NMF requires that each data point is approximated by a convex combination of basis elements. Archetypal analysis (AA), also referred to as convex NMF, is a well-known NMF variant imposing that the basis elements are themselves convex combinations of the data points. AA has the advantage to be more interpretable than NMF because the basis elements are directly constructed from the data points. However, it usually suffers from a high data fitting error because the basis elements are constrained to be contained in the convex cone of the data points. In this letter, we introduce near-convex archetypal analysis (NCAA) which combines the advantages of both AA and NMF. As for AA, the basis vectors are required to be linear combinations of the data points and hence are easily interpretable. As for NMF, the additional flexibility in choosing the basis elements allows NCAA to have a low data fitting error. We show that NCAA compares favorably with a state-of-the-art minimum-volume NMF method on synthetic datasets and on a real-world hyperspectral image.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2018arXiv

Accelerating Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Algorithms using Extrapolation

In this paper, we propose a general framework to accelerate significantly the algorithms for nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). This framework is inspired from the extrapolation scheme used to accelerate gradient methods in convex optimization and from the method of parallel tangents. However, the use of extrapolation in the context of the two-block exact coordinate descent algorithms tackling the non-convex NMF problems is novel. We illustrate the performance of this approach on two state-of-the-art NMF algorithms, namely, accelerated hierarchical alternating least squares (A-HALS) and alternating nonnegative least squares (ANLS), using synthetic, image and document data sets.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access