A Riemannian gossip approach to decentralized subspace learning on Grassmann manifold

In this paper, we propose novel gossip algorithms for decentralized subspace learning problems that are modeled as finite sum problems on the Grassmann manifold. Interesting applications in this setting include low-rank matrix completion and multi-task feature learning, both of which are naturally reformulated in the considered setup. To exploit the finite sum structure, the problem is distributed among different agents and a novel cost function is proposed that is a weighted sum of the tasks handled by the agents and the communication cost among the agents. The proposed modeling approach allows local subspace learning by different agents while achieving asymptotic consensus on the global learned subspace. The resulting approach is scalable and parallelizable. Our numerical experiments show the good performance of the proposed algorithms on various benchmarks, e.g., the Netflix dataset.