Optimization-based AMP for Phase Retrieval: The Impact of Initialization and ell₂-regularization

We consider an $\ell_2$-regularized non-convex optimization problem for recovering signals from their noisy phaseless observations. We design and study the performance of a message passing algorithm that aims to solve this optimization problem. We consider the asymptotic setting $m,n \rightarrow \infty$, $m/n \rightarrow \delta$ and obtain sharp performance bounds, where $m$ is the number of measurements and $n$ is the signal dimension. We show that for complex signals the algorithm can perform accurate recovery with only $m= \left(\frac{64}{\pi^2}-4\right)n \approx 2.5n$ measurements. Also, we provide sharp analysis on the sensitivity of the algorithm to noise. We highlight the following facts about our message passing algorithm: (i) Adding $\ell_2$ regularization to the non-convex loss function can be beneficial. (ii) Spectral initialization has marginal impact on the performance of the algorithm. The sharp analyses in this paper, not only enable us to compare the performance of our method with other phase recovery schemes, but also shed light on designing better iterative algorithms for other non-convex optimization problems.