Construction of optimal spectral methods in phase retrieval

TL;DR

This paper develops a unified framework for constructing optimal spectral methods for phase retrieval in high-dimensional settings, accommodating various noise models and matrix types without hyperparameter tuning.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining message-passing linearization and Bethe Hessian analysis to derive hyperparameter-free, optimal spectral algorithms for phase retrieval.

Findings

Unified spectral method framework for phase retrieval.

Optimal algorithms for arbitrary noise and matrix types.

No hyperparameter tuning required.

Abstract

We consider the phase retrieval problem, in which the observer wishes to recover a $n$-dimensional real or complex signal $\mathbf{X}^\star$ from the (possibly noisy) observation of $|\mathbf{\Phi} \mathbf{X}^\star|$, in which $\mathbf{\Phi}$ is a matrix of size $m \times n$. We consider a \emph{high-dimensional} setting where $n,m \to \infty$ with $m/n = \mathcal{O}(1)$, and a large class of (possibly correlated) random matrices $\mathbf{\Phi}$ and observation channels. Spectral methods are a powerful tool to obtain approximate observations of the signal $\mathbf{X}^\star$ which can be then used as initialization for a subsequent algorithm, at a low computational cost. In this paper, we extend and unify previous results and approaches on spectral methods for the phase retrieval problem. More precisely, we combine the linearization of message-passing algorithms and the analysis of the \emph{Bethe Hessian}, a classical tool of statistical physics. Using this toolbox, we show how to derive optimal spectral methods for arbitrary channel noise and right-unitarily invariant matrix $\mathbf{\Phi}$, in an automated manner (i.e. with no optimization over any hyperparameter or preprocessing function).