Abstract
arXiv:2605.29426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the problem of Gaussian mean testing in a distributed, communication constrained setting, where each of $n$ users independently observes samples from an unknown $d$-dimensional spherical Gaussian distribution $\mathcal{G}(\mu,\mathbb{I}_d)$, and can communicate up to $\ell$ bits to a central referee. The referee's goal is then to distinguish between cases (i) $\|\mu\|_2 = 0$ versus (ii) $\|\mu\|_2\ge \varepsilon$. This problem has been considered in the private- and public-coin settings, when each user holds exactly one sample, or more generally when each holds exactly $m$ samples. In this work, we significantly generalize the question in three directions: when the users only share a small number $s$ of random bits, when each user holds a different number of samples $m_k$, and when each user can send a different number of bits $\ell_k$ to the referee.