Follow the Compressed Leader: Faster Online Learning of Eigenvectors and Faster MMWU

Abstract

The online problem of computing the top eigenvector is fundamental to machine learning. The famous matrix-multiplicative-weight-update (MMWU) framework solves this online problem and gives optimal regret. However, since MMWU runs very slow due to the computation of matrix exponentials, researchers proposed the follow-the-perturbed-leader (FTPL) framework which is faster, but a factor $\sqrt{d}$ worse than the optimal regret for dimension-$d$ matrices. We propose a