Exact Rank-Space KL Projection for Shared-Marginal Low-Rank Factors: Application to Doubly Stochastic Clustering

We study exact Kullback--Leibler (KL) projection for low-rank factorizations whose two nonnegative factors have prescribed row marginals and a shared, learned column marginal. For arbitrary positive row marginals of equal total mass, the joint KL projection reduces exactly to a strictly convex gauge-fixed dual with only r-1 effective variables; its Hessian is a sum of categorical covariance terms and admits O((n+m)r) matrix-free Hessian--vector products. The projection theorem is objective-independent. We then specialize this geometry to doubly stochastic (DS) graph learning through W=UoperatornameDiag(g)-1V^top, where row-simplex factors with a common column mass induce an exactly DS graph without materializing an n× n optimization variable. Combined with observed-edge sparse fitting, a stochastic anchor-reduced manifold regularizer, and Bregman backtracking, the resulting mirror-descent method preserves exact feasibility at every accepted step. Under a nonvanishing latent-mass condition, it satisfies sufficient decrease and an O(1/N) mirror-stationarity bound, while strictly positive accumulation points are KKT stationary. Matched clustering experiments show competitive accuracy, feasibility residuals near numerical precision, and favorable anytime behavior without a dense learned graph.