Rank Optimality for the Burer--Monteiro Factorization

When solving large scale semidefinite programs that admit a low-rank solution, a very efficient heuristic is the Burer-Monteiro factorization: Instead of optimizing over the full matrix, one optimizes over its low-rank factors. This strongly reduces the number of variables to optimize, but destroys the convexity of the problem, thus possibly introducing spurious second-order critical points which can prevent local optimization algorithms from finding the solution. Boumal, Voroninski, and Bandeira [2018] have recently shown that, when the size of the factors is of the order of the square root of the number of linear constraints, this does not happen: For almost any cost matrix, second-order critical points are global solutions. In this article, we show that this result is essentially tight: For smaller values of the size, second-order critical points are not generically optimal, even when considering only semidefinite programs with a rank 1 solution.