Sharp Injective Norm Bounds for Inhomogeneous Gaussian Tensors and Sparse Extensions

Abstract

We study the Euclidean injective norm of inhomogeneous random tensors with independent entries. For Gaussian tensors, we establish optimal two-sided bounds for the expected norm, with constants depending only on the tensor order. These bounds describe the interplay between variance accumulation along fibres and the contribution of the largest individual entries. In the matrix case, our result is consistent with the characterizations in~\cite{LVHY18}. We then extend the analysis to sparse Gaussian tensors with arbitrary amplitudes and activation probabilities. The expected norm is characterized by the expected largest absolute entry and the largest fibre standard deviation after truncating amplitudes at this scale. Our proofs combine geometric chaining with estimates for averaging over the random support.