Multi-Dictionary Learning for Low Rank Sparse Coding
arXiv:2509.10033
The paper introduces a low‑rank coding model for learning two dictionaries simultaneously, and proposes an alternating convex optimization algorithm (AODL) that yields sparser representations and improves reconstruction and missing‑value imputation.
Abstract
Sparse dictionary coding represents signals as linear combinations of a few dictionary atoms. It has been applied to images, time series, graph signals and multi-way spatio-temporal data by jointly employing temporal and spatial dictionaries. Data-agnostic analytical dictionaries, such as the discrete Fourier transform, wavelets and graph Fourier, have seen wide adoption due to efficient implementations and good practical performance. On the other hand, dictionaries learned from data offer sparser and more accurate solutions but require learning of both the dictionaries and the coding coefficients. This becomes especially challenging for multi-dictionary scenarios since encoding coefficients correspond to all atom combinations from the dictionaries. To address this challenge, we propose a low-rank coding model for 2-dictionary scenarios and study its data complexity. Namely, we establish upper and lower bounds on the number of samples needed to learn dictionaries that generalize to unseen samples from the same distribution. We propose an alternating convex optimization solution, called AODL, which employs alternating optimization between the sparse coding matrices and the learned dictionaries. We demonstrate its quality for data reconstruction and missing value imputation in both synthetic and real-world datasets. For a fixed reconstruction quality, AODL learns up to sparser solutions compared to non-low-rank and analytical (fixed) dictionary baselines. In addition, the learned dictionaries reveal interpretable insights into patterns from training samples.