Marco Mondelli recently posted his latest paper on the arXiv (joint work with Andrea Montanari). This paper proves sharp guarantees for weak recovery in phase retrieval. In particular, given phaseless measurements against Gaussian vectors, they demonstrate that a properly tuned spectral estimate exhibits correlation with the ground truth, even when the sampling rate is at the information-theoretic limit. In addition, they show that their spectral estimate empirically performs well even when the measurements follow a more realistic coded diffraction model. I decided to reach out to Marco to learn more, and what follows is my interview. I’ve lightly edited his responses for formatting and hyperlinks:
DGM: Judging by your website, this project in phase retrieval appears to be a departure from your coding theory background. How did this project come about?
MM: Many of the tools employed in information and coding theory are very general and they prove useful also to solve problems in other fields, such as, compressed sensing, machine learning or data analysis. So this is the general philosophy that motivated my “detour”.
Continue reading Fundamental Limits of Weak Recovery with Applications to Phase Retrieval