Spectrum-aware debiasing conjecture for non-separable convex penalties

Let h:RpR\vec{h}:\mathbb{R}^p\mapsto\mathbb{R} be a proper, closed, twice-differentiable convex penalty, or admit a twice-differentiable extension, and let

β^argminbRp  12yXb2+h(b).\hat{\bm{\beta}} \in \underset{\mathbf{b} \in \mathbb{R}^p}{\arg\min}\; \frac{1}{2}\|\mathbf{y}-\mathbf{X}\mathbf{b}\|^2+\vec{h}(\mathbf{b}).

Define β^u\hat{\bm{\beta}}^u, adj^\widehat{\mathsf{adj}}, and τ^\hat{\tau}_* by the formulas preceding the conjecture, with adj^\widehat{\mathsf{adj}} satisfying

1pi=1p1di2adj^pTr((adj^Ip+Σ1(2h(β^)))1)+1=1.\frac{1}{p}\sum_{i=1}^p\frac{1}{\frac{d_i^2-\widehat{\mathsf{adj}}}{p}\operatorname{Tr}\left(\left(\widehat{\mathsf{adj}}\cdot\mathbf{I}_p+\bm{\Sigma}^{-1}\left(\nabla^2\vec{h}(\hat{\bm{\beta}})\right)\right)^{-1}\right)+1}=1.

Spectrum-aware debiasing conjecture. Under suitable conditions, there is a unique solution adj^\widehat{\mathsf{adj}} of this equation and

τ^1/2(β^uβ)=Σ1/2z+O(p1/2),\hat{\tau}_*^{-1/2}(\hat{\bm{\beta}}^u-\bm{\beta}^\star)=\bm{\Sigma}^{1/2}\mathbf{z}+O\left(p^{-1/2}\right),

where zN(0,Ip)\mathbf{z}\sim N(\mathbf{0},\mathbf{I}_p) and O(p1/2)O\left(p^{-1/2}\right) denotes a vector vRp\mathbf{v}\in\mathbb{R}^p satisfying 1pv20\frac{1}{p}\|\mathbf{v}\|^2\to0 almost surely as pp\to\infty. This conjecture proposes an asymptotically Gaussian distribution for the debiased estimator under non-separable penalties; the uniqueness and the stated approximation remain open.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Yufan Li and Pragya Sur, “Spectrum-Aware Debiasing: A Modern Inference Framework with Applications to Principal Components Regression”, arXiv:2309.07810 (2025).

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