Nuclear norm of higher-order tensors

We establish several mathematical and computational properties of the nuclear norm for higher-order tensors. We show that like tensor rank, tensor nuclear norm is dependent on the choice of base field — the value of the nuclear norm of a real 3-tensor depends on whether we regard it as a real 3-tensor or a complex 3-tensor with real entries. We show that every tensor has a nuclear norm attaining decomposition and every symmetric tensor has a symmetric nuclear norm attaining decomposition. There is a corresponding notion of nuclear rank that, unlike tensor rank, is upper semicontinuous. We establish an analogue of Banach’s theorem for tensor spectral norm and Comon’s conjecture for tensor rank — for a symmetric tensor, its symmetric nuclear norm always equals its nuclear norm. We show that computing tensor nuclear norm is NP-hard in several ways. Deciding weak membership in the nuclear norm unit ball of 3-tensors is NP-hard, as is finding an ε-approximation of nuclear norm for 3-tensors. In addition, the problem of computing spectral or nuclear norm of a 4-tensor is NP-hard, even if we restrict the 4-tensor to be bi-Hermitian, bisymmetric, positive semidefinite, nonnegative valued, or all of the above. We discuss some simple polynomial-time approximation bounds. As an aside, we show that computing the nuclear (p, q)-norm of a matrix is NP-hard in general but polynomial-time if p = 1, q = 1, or p = q = 2, with closed-form expressions for the nuclear (1, q)and (p, 1)-norms.