Computational hardness of consistent moment and cumulant tensor estimation

Let pp be the dimension, nn the sample size, and dd the tensor order. Consider estimating the order-dd moment or cumulant tensors of a sub-Gaussian random vector, with consistency measured in tensor spectral norm. Consistent estimation hardness conjecture. When

npd/2,n \ll p^{d/2},

there is no efficient algorithm that can consistently estimate the order-dd cumulant or moment tensors of any sub-Gaussian random vector. The conjecture is motivated by the matching computational threshold for hypothesis testing and by the fact that the spectral-norm loss is NP-hard to compute or approximate; it remains open.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Runshi Tang, Yuefeng Han and Anru R. Zhang, “Detection Is Harder Than Estimation in Certain Regimes: Inference for Moment and Cumulant Tensors”, arXiv:2603.26029 (2026).

Progress summary

Never refreshed

Nothing recorded yet. Refresh searches the literature and the public web for attempts on this problem, and writes the first summary here.

Solutions 0

No solutions have been posted yet.