Report on "Geometry and representation theory of tensors for computer science, statistics and other areas."

This is a technical report on the proceedings of the workshop held July 21 to July 25, 2008 at the American Institute of Mathematics, Palo Alto, California, organized by Joseph Landsberg, Lek-Heng Lim, Jason Morton, and Jerzy Weyman. We include a list of open problems coming from applications in 4 different areas: signal processing, the Mulmuley-Sohoni approach to P vs. NP, matchgates and holographic algorithms, and entanglement and quantum information theory. We emphasize the interactions between geometry and representation theory and these applied areas

Border Ranks of Monomials

Young flattenings, introduced by Landsberg and Ottaviani, give determinantal equations for secant varieties and their non-vanishing provides lower bounds for border ranks of tensors and in particular polynomials. We study monomial-optimal shapes for Young flattenings, which exhibit the limits of the Young flattening method. In particular, they provide the best possible lower bound for large classes of monomials including all monomials up to degree 6, monomials in 3 variables, and any power of the product of variables. On the other hand, for degree 7 and higher there are monomials for which no Young flattening can give a lower bound that matches the conjecturally tight upper bound of Landsberg and Teitler.Comment: Completely re-written. Changes are summarized in Remark 1.1

The ideal of the trifocal variety

Techniques from representation theory, symbolic computational algebra, and numerical algebraic geometry are used to find the minimal generators of the ideal of the trifocal variety. An effective test for determining whether a given tensor is a trifocal tensor is also given

Secant cumulants and toric geometry

We study the secant line variety of the Segre product of projective spaces using special cumulant coordinates adapted for secant varieties. We show that the secant variety is covered by open normal toric varieties. We prove that in cumulant coordinates its ideal is generated by binomial quadrics. We present new results on the local structure of the secant variety. In particular, we show that it has rational singularities and we give a description of the singular locus. We also classify all secant varieties that are Gorenstein. Moreover, generalizing (Sturmfels and Zwiernik 2012), we obtain analogous results for the tangential variety.Comment: Some improvements to previous results, with other minor changes. Updated reference

Homotopy techniques for tensor decomposition and perfect identifiability

Let T be a general complex tensor of format $(n_1,...,n_d)$. When the fraction $\prod_in_i/[1+\sum_i(n_i-1)]$ is an integer, and a natural inequality (called balancedness) is satisfied, it is expected that T has finitely many minimal decomposition as a sum of decomposable tensors. We show how homotopy techniques allow us to find all the decompositions of T, starting from a given one. Computationally, this gives a guess regarding the total number of such decompositions. This guess matches exactly with all cases previously known, and predicts several unknown cases. Some surprising experiments yielded two new cases of generic identifiability: formats (3,4,5) and (2,2,2,3) which have a unique decomposition as the sum of 6 and 4 decomposable tensors, respectively. We conjecture that these two cases together with the classically known matrix pencils are the only cases where generic identifiability holds, i.e., the only identifiable cases. Building on the computational experiments, we use algebraic geometry to prove these two new cases are indeed generically identifiable.Comment: 21 pages, two Macaulay2 codes as ancillary files. Conjecture 1.4 in v1 is now Theorem 1.4 by Galuppi and Mell

Decomposing Tensors into Frames

A symmetric tensor of small rank decomposes into a configuration of only few vectors. We study the variety of tensors for which this configuration is a unit norm tight frame.Comment: 23 page