Abstract: The sparse additive model for text modeling involves the sum-of-exp computing, with consuming costs for large scales. Moreover, the assumption of equal background across all classes/topics may be too strong. This paper extends to propose sparse additive model with low rank background (SAM-LRB), and simple yet efficient estimation. Particularly, by employing a double majorization bound, we approximate the log-likelihood into a quadratic lower-bound with the sum-of-exp terms absent. The constraints of low rank and sparsity are then simply embodied by nuclear norm and $\ell_1$-norm regularizers. Interestingly, we find that the optimization task in this manner can be transformed into the same form as that in Robust PCA. Consequently, parameters of supervised SAM-LRB can be efficiently learned using an existing algorithm for Robust PCA based on accelerated proximal gradient. Besides the supervised case, we extend SAM-LRB to also favor unsupervised and multifaceted scenarios. Experiments on real world data demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SAM-LRB, showing state-of-the-art performances.