Polynomial-Time Power-Sum Decomposition of Polynomials

We give efficient algorithms for finding power-sum decomposition of an input polynomial P(x)= Si=m pi(x)d with component pis. The case of linear pis is equivalent to the well-studied tensor decomposition problem while the quadratic case occurs naturally in studying identifiability of non-spherical Gaussian mixtures from low-order moments. Unlike tensor decomposition, both the unique identifiability and algorithms for this problem are not well-understood. For the simplest setting of quadratic pis and d = 3, prior work of [11] yields an algorithm only when m = O(vn). On the other hand, the more general recent result of [13] builds an algebraic approach to handle any m = nO(1) components but only when d is large enough (while yielding no bounds for d=3 or even d=100) and only handles an inverse exponential noise. Our results obtain a substantial quantitative improvement on both the prior works above even in the base case of d=3 and quadratic pis. Specifically, our algorithm succeeds in decomposing a sum of m ~ O(n) generic quadratic pis for d=3 and more generally the dth power-sum of m ~ n2d/15 generic degree-K polynomials for any K = 2. Our algorithm relies only on basic numerical linear algebraic primitives, is exact (i.e., obtain arbitrarily tiny error up to numerical precision), and handles an inverse polynomial noise when the pis have random Gaussian coefficients. Our main tool is a new method for extracting the linear span of pis by studying the linear subspace of low-order partial derivatives of the input P. For establishing polynomial stability of our algorithm in average-case, we prove inverse polynomial bounds on the smallest singular value of certain correlated random matrices with low-degree polynomial entries that arise in our analyses. Since previous techniques only yield significantly weaker bounds, we analyze the smallest singular value of matrices by studying the largest singular value of certain deviation matrices via graph matrix decomposition and the trace moment method.