English

Statistical-computational gap in multiple Gaussian graph alignment

Machine Learning 2025-12-02 v1 Machine Learning Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

We investigate the existence of a statistical-computational gap in multiple Gaussian graph alignment. We first generalize a previously established informational threshold from Vassaux and Massouli\'e (2025) to regimes where the number of observed graphs pp may also grow with the number of nodes nn: when pO(n/log(n))p \leq O(n/\log(n)), we recover the results from Vassaux and Massouli\'e (2025), and pΩ(n/log(n))p \geq \Omega(n/\log(n)) corresponds to a regime where the problem is as difficult as aligning one single graph with some unknown "signal" graph. Moreover, when logp=ω(logn)\log p = \omega(\log n), the informational thresholds for partial and exact recovery no longer coincide, in contrast to the all-or-nothing phenomenon observed when logp=O(logn)\log p=O(\log n). Then, we provide the first computational barrier in the low-degree framework for (multiple) Gaussian graph alignment. We prove that when the correlation ρ\rho is less than 11, up to logarithmic terms, low degree non-trivial estimation fails. Our results suggest that the task of aligning pp graphs in polynomial time is as hard as the problem of aligning two graphs in polynomial time, up to logarithmic factors. These results characterize the existence of a statistical-computational gap and provide another example in which polynomial-time algorithms cannot handle complex combinatorial bi-dimensional structures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.00610,
  title  = {Statistical-computational gap in multiple Gaussian graph alignment},
  author = {Bertrand Even and Luca Ganassali},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.00610},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:01:04.191Z