Robust Low-Rank Tensor Completion based on M-product with Weighted Correlated Total Variation and Sparse Regularization

arXiv stat.ML / 4/16/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper tackles robust low-rank tensor completion under missing entries, outliers, and sparse noise, highlighting that prior uniform regularization (tensor nuclear norm and \ell_1) can over-shrink important structure.
  • It introduces a tensor weighted correlated total variation (TWCTV) regularizer using an M-product framework that blends weighted Schatten-p norm (low-rankness), smoothness/gradient modeling, and weighted sparse regularization for better noise suppression.
  • The proposed adaptive weighting scheme reduces thresholding selectively to preserve dominant singular values and sparse components, aiming to retain critical tensor structure and fine details.
  • An enhanced ADMM algorithm is developed with computational efficiency and convergence analysis tailored to the M-product setting.
  • Experiments on image completion, denoising, and background subtraction show improved results versus established benchmark methods, supporting the method’s effectiveness.

Abstract

The robust low-rank tensor completion problem addresses the challenge of recovering corrupted high-dimensional tensor data with missing entries, outliers, and sparse noise commonly found in real-world applications. Existing methodologies have encountered fundamental limitations due to their reliance on uniform regularization schemes, particularly the tensor nuclear norm and \ell_1 norm regularization approaches, which indiscriminately apply equal shrinkage to all singular values and sparse components, thereby compromising the preservation of critical tensor structures. The proposed tensor weighted correlated total variation (TWCTV) regularizer addresses these shortcomings through an M-product framework that combines a weighted Schatten-p norm on gradient tensors for low-rankness with smoothness enforcement and weighted sparse components for noise suppression. The proposed weighting scheme adaptively reduces the thresholding level to preserve both dominant singular values and sparse components, thus improving the reconstruction of critical structural elements and nuanced details in the recovered signal. Through a systematic algorithmic approach, we introduce an enhanced alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) that offers both computational efficiency and theoretical substantiation, with convergence properties comprehensively analyzed within the M-product framework.Comprehensive numerical evaluations across image completion, denoising, and background subtraction tasks validate the superior performance of this approach relative to established benchmark methods.