Operator scaling with specified marginals

The completely positive operators, which can be viewed as a generalization of the nonnegative matrices, are maps between spaces of linear operators arising in the study of C*-algebras. The existence of the operator analogues of doubly stochastic scalings of matrices is equivalent to a multitude of problems in computer science and mathematics, such rational identity testing in non-commuting variables, noncommutative rank of symbolic matrices, and a basic problem in invariant theory (Garg, Gurvits, Oliveira and Wigderson, FOCS, 2016). We study operator scaling with specified marginals, which is the operator analogue of scaling matrices to specified row and column sums. We characterize the operators which can be scaled to given marginals, much in the spirit of the Gurvits' algorithmic characterization of the operators that can be scaled to doubly stochastic (Gurvits, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 2004). Our algorithm produces approximate scalings in time poly(n,m) whenever scalings exist. A central ingredient in our analysis is a reduction from the specified marginals setting to the doubly stochastic setting. Operator scaling with specified marginals arises in diverse areas of study such as the Brascamp-Lieb inequalities, communication complexity, eigenvalues of sums of Hermitian matrices, and quantum information theory. Some of the known theorems in these areas, several of which had no effective proof, are straightforward consequences of our characterization theorem. For instance, we obtain a simple algorithm to find, when they exist, a tuple of Hermitian matrices with given spectra whose sum has a given spectrum. We also prove new theorems such as a generalization of Forster's theorem (Forster, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 2002) concerning radial isotropic position.