Symmetric Sparse Boolean Matrix Factorization and Applications

Sitan Chen, Zhao Song, Runzhou Tao, Ruizhe Zhang

Abstract: In this work, we study a variant of nonnegative matrix factorization where we wish to find a symmetric factorization of a given input matrix into a sparse, Boolean matrix. Formally speaking, given {𝐌} ∈ {ℤ}^{m× m}, we want to find {𝐖} ∈ {0,1}^{m× r} such that ‖ {𝐌} - {𝐖} {𝐖}^⊤ ‖₀ is minimized among all {𝐖} for which each row is k-sparse. This question turns out to be closely related to a number of questions like recovering a hypergraph from its line graph, as well as reconstruction attacks for private neural network training. As this problem is hard in the worst-case, we study a natural average-case variant that arises in the context of these reconstruction attacks: {𝐌} = {𝐖} {𝐖}^{⊤} for {𝐖} a random Boolean matrix with k-sparse rows, and the goal is to recover {𝐖} up to column permutation. Equivalently, this can be thought of as recovering a uniformly random k-uniform hypergraph from its line graph. Our main result is a polynomial-time algorithm for this problem based on bootstrapping higher-order information about {𝐖} and then decomposing an appropriate tensor. The key ingredient in our analysis, which may be of independent interest, is to show that such a matrix {𝐖} has full column rank with high probability as soon as m = Ω̃(r), which we do using tools from Littlewood-Offord theory and estimates for binary Krawtchouk polynomials.