Understanding Deflation Process in Over-parametrized Tensor Decomposition

In this paper we study the training dynamics for gradient flow on overparametrized tensor decomposition problems. Empirically, such training process often first fits larger components and then discovers smaller components, which is similar to a tensor deflation process that is commonly used in tensor decomposition algorithms. We prove that for orthogonally decomposable tensor, a slightly modified version of gradient flow would follow a tensor deflation process and recover all the tensor components. Our proof suggests that for orthogonal tensors, gradient flow dynamics works similarly as greedy low-rank learning in the matrix setting, which is a first step towards understanding the implicit regularization effect of over-parametrized models for low-rank tensors. * Alphabetical order. 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021).