We consider the problem of recovering a low-rank tensor from its noisy observation. Previous work has shown a recovery guarantee with signal to noise ratio $O(n^{lceil K/2 rceil /2})$ for recovering a $K$th order rank one tensor of size $ntimes cdots times n$ by recursive unfolding. In this paper, we first improve this bound to $O(n^{K/4})$ by a much simpler approach, but with a more careful analysis. Then we propose a new norm called the subspace norm, which is based on the Kronecker products of factors obtained by the proposed simple estimator. The imposed Kronecker structure allows us to show a nearly ideal $O(sqrt{n}+sqrt{H^{K-1}})$ bound, in which the parameter $H$ controls the blend from the non-convex estimator to mode-wise nuclear norm minimization. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that the subspace norm achieves the nearly ideal denoising performance even with $H=O(1)$.
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