TENALIGN: Joint Tensor Alignment and Coupled Factorization

Multimodal datasets represented as tensors oftentimes share some of their modes. However, even though there may exist a one-to-one (or perhaps partial) correspondence between the coupled modes, such correspondence/alignment may not be given, especially when integrating datasets from disparate sources. This is a very important problem, broadly termed as entity alignment or matching, and subsets of the problem such as graph matching have been extremely popular in the recent years. In order to solve this problem, current work computes the alignment based on existing embeddings of the data. This can be problematic if our end goal is the joint analysis of the two datasets into the same latent factor space: the embeddings computed separately per dataset may yield a suboptimal alignment, and if such an alignment is used to subsequently compute the joint latent factors, the computation will similarly be plagued by compounding errors incurred by the imperfect alignment. In this work, we are the first to define and solve the problem of joint tensor alignment and factorization into a shared latent space. By posing this as a unified problem and solving for both tasks simultaneously, we observe that the both alignment and factorization tasks benefit each other resulting in superior performance compared to two-stage approaches. We extensively evaluate our proposed method TENALIGN and conduct a thorough sensitivity and ablation analysis. We demonstrate that TENALIGN significantly outperforms baseline approaches where embedding and matching happen separately.