In this paper, we propose a method for the approximation of the solution of
high-dimensional weakly coercive problems formulated in tensor spaces using
low-rank approximation formats. The method can be seen as a perturbation of a
minimal residual method with residual norm corresponding to the error in a
specified solution norm. We introduce and analyze an iterative algorithm that
is able to provide a controlled approximation of the optimal approximation of
the solution in a given low-rank subset, without any a priori information on
this solution. We also introduce a weak greedy algorithm which uses this
perturbed minimal residual method for the computation of successive greedy
corrections in small tensor subsets. We prove its convergence under some
conditions on the parameters of the algorithm. The residual norm can be
designed such that the resulting low-rank approximations are quasi-optimal with
respect to particular norms of interest, thus yielding to goal-oriented order
reduction strategies for the approximation of high-dimensional problems. The
proposed numerical method is applied to the solution of a stochastic partial
differential equation which is discretized using standard Galerkin methods in
tensor product spaces