Tensor Decomposition Structure Search Framework from an Interaction Perspective

Abstract

Recently, tensor decompositions have attracted increasing attention. Fundamentally, different interactions among factors induce distinct tensor decomposition structures (i.e., tensor decomposition). Identifying an appropriate interaction-induced tensor decomposition structure for given data is a fundamental yet challenging problem in tensor modeling, and remains largely under-explored. Existing tensor decomposition structure search methods are typically restricted to a predefined interaction family, such as tensor contraction. To address this problem, we suggest a tensor decomposition structure search framework (I-TSS) from an interaction perspective that can identify either a single structure beyond a predefined interaction family or a mixture of structures involving heterogeneous interaction families. Specifically, we first systematically review existing tensor decomposition structures from an interaction perspective and construct a heterogeneous interaction-induced candidate structure set. Based on it, we propose a unified energy-based rank estimation scheme for heterogeneous interaction-induced candidate structure set. We then introduce the top-$k$ gating mechanism with learnable gating scores to dynamically select a suitable single-candidate structure or combine suitable multi-candidate structures, thereby identifying the tensor decomposition structure in a data-adaptive manner. Theoretically, we derive an approximation error bound for I-TSS, thereby establishing its approximation capability. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that I-TSS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art tensor decomposition methods.