A super-resolution framework for tensor decomposition

This work considers a super-resolution framework forovercomplete tensor decomposition. Specifically, we view tensor decomposition as a super-resolution problem of recovering a sum of Dirac measures on the sphere and solve it by minimizing a continuous analog of the ℓ₁ norm on the space of measures. The optimal value of this optimization defines the tensor nuclear norm. Similar to the separation condition in the super-resolution problem, by explicitly constructing a dual certificate, we develop incoherence conditions of the tensor factors so that they form the unique optimal solution of the continuous analog of ℓ₁ norm minimization. Remarkably, the derived incoherence conditions are satisfied with high probability by random tensor factors uniformly distributed on the sphere, implying global identifiability of random tensor factors.