Learning tensors from partial binary measurements

In this paper we generalize the 1-bit matrix completion problem to higher order tensors. We prove that when $r=O(1)$ a bounded rank-$r$, order-$d$ tensor $T$ in $\mathbb{R}^{N} \times \mathbb{R}^{N} \times \cdots \times \mathbb{R}^{N}$ can be estimated efficiently by only $m=O(Nd)$ binary measurements by regularizing its max-qnorm and M-norm as surrogates for its rank. We prove that similar to the matrix case, i.e., when $d=2$, the sample complexity of recovering a low-rank tensor from 1-bit measurements of a subset of its entries is the same as recovering it from unquantized measurements. Moreover, we show the advantage of using 1-bit tensor completion over matricization both theoretically and numerically. Specifically, we show how the 1-bit measurement model can be used for context-aware recommender systems.