Wedge Sampling: Efficient Tensor Completion with Nearly-Linear Sample Complexity

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Luo, Hengrui, Ma, Anna, Stephan, Ludovic, Zhu, Yizhe
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Luo, Hengrui
Ma, Anna
Stephan, Ludovic
Zhu, Yizhe
author_facet Luo, Hengrui
Ma, Anna
Stephan, Ludovic
Zhu, Yizhe
contents We introduce Wedge Sampling, a new non-adaptive sampling scheme for low-rank tensor completion. We study recovery of an order-$k$ low-rank tensor of dimension $n \times \cdots \times n$ from a subset of its entries. Unlike the standard uniform entry model (i.e., i.i.d. samples from $[n]^k$), wedge sampling allocates observations to structured length-two patterns (wedges) in an associated bipartite sampling graph. By directly promoting these length-two connections, the sampling design strengthens the spectral signal that underlies efficient initialization, in regimes where uniform sampling is too sparse to generate enough informative correlations. Our main result shows that this change in sampling paradigm enables polynomial-time algorithms to achieve both weak and exact recovery with nearly linear sample complexity in $n$. The approach is also plug-and-play: wedge-sampling-based spectral initialization can be combined with existing refinement procedures (e.g., spectral or gradient-based methods) using only an additional $\tilde{O}(n)$ uniformly sampled entries, substantially improving over the $\tilde{O}(n^{k/2})$ sample complexity typically required under uniform entry sampling for efficient methods. Overall, our results suggest that the statistical-to-computational gap highlighted in Barak and Moitra (2022) is, to a large extent, a consequence of the uniform entry sampling model for tensor completion, and that alternative non-adaptive measurement designs that guarantee a strong initialization can overcome this barrier.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_05869
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Wedge Sampling: Efficient Tensor Completion with Nearly-Linear Sample Complexity
Luo, Hengrui
Ma, Anna
Stephan, Ludovic
Zhu, Yizhe
Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
Probability
Statistics Theory
We introduce Wedge Sampling, a new non-adaptive sampling scheme for low-rank tensor completion. We study recovery of an order-$k$ low-rank tensor of dimension $n \times \cdots \times n$ from a subset of its entries. Unlike the standard uniform entry model (i.e., i.i.d. samples from $[n]^k$), wedge sampling allocates observations to structured length-two patterns (wedges) in an associated bipartite sampling graph. By directly promoting these length-two connections, the sampling design strengthens the spectral signal that underlies efficient initialization, in regimes where uniform sampling is too sparse to generate enough informative correlations. Our main result shows that this change in sampling paradigm enables polynomial-time algorithms to achieve both weak and exact recovery with nearly linear sample complexity in $n$. The approach is also plug-and-play: wedge-sampling-based spectral initialization can be combined with existing refinement procedures (e.g., spectral or gradient-based methods) using only an additional $\tilde{O}(n)$ uniformly sampled entries, substantially improving over the $\tilde{O}(n^{k/2})$ sample complexity typically required under uniform entry sampling for efficient methods. Overall, our results suggest that the statistical-to-computational gap highlighted in Barak and Moitra (2022) is, to a large extent, a consequence of the uniform entry sampling model for tensor completion, and that alternative non-adaptive measurement designs that guarantee a strong initialization can overcome this barrier.
title Wedge Sampling: Efficient Tensor Completion with Nearly-Linear Sample Complexity
topic Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
Probability
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05869