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This is accomplished by a novel procedure, which starting from an initial guess given by a spectral initialization procedure, attempts to minimize a nonconvex objective. The proposed algorithm distinguishes from prior approaches by regularizing the initialization and descent procedures in an adaptive fashion, which discard terms bearing too much influence on the initial estimate or search directions. These careful selection rules--which effectively serve as a variance reduction scheme--provide a tighter initial guess, more robust descent directions, and thus enhanced practical performance. Further, this procedure also achieves a nearoptimal statistical accuracy in the presence of noise. Empirically, we demonstrate that the computational cost of our algorithm is about four times that of solving a least-squares problem of the same size.

The problem of recovering a signal $\boldsymbol{x} \in \mathbb{R}^n$ from a quadratic system $\{y_i=\boldsymbol{x}^\top\boldsymbol{A}_i\boldsymbol{x},\ i=1,\ldots,m\}$ with full-rank matrices $\boldsymbol{A}_i$ frequently arises in applications such as unassigned distance geometry and sub-wavelength imaging. With i.i.d. standard Gaussian matrices $\boldsymbol{A}_i$, this paper addresses the high-dimensional case where $m\ll n$ by incorporating prior knowledge of $\boldsymbol{x}$. First, we consider a $k$-sparse $\boldsymbol{x}$ and introduce the thresholded Wirtinger flow (TWF) algorithm that does not require the sparsity level $k$. TWF comprises two steps: the spectral initialization that identifies a point sufficiently close to $\boldsymbol{x}$ (up to a sign flip) when $m=O(k^2\log n)$, and the thresholded gradient descent (with a good initialization) that produces a sequence linearly converging to $\boldsymbol{x}$ with $m=O(k\log n)$ measurements. Second, we explore the generative prior, assuming that $\boldsymbol{x}$ lies in the range of an $L$-Lipschitz continuous generative model with $k$-dimensional inputs in an $\ell_2$-ball of radius $r$. We develop the projected gradient descent (PGD) algorithm that also comprises two steps: the projected power method that provides an initial vector with $O\big(\sqrt{\frac{k \log L}{m}}\big)$ $\ell_2$-error given $m=O(k\log(Lnr))$ measurements, and the projected gradient descent that refines the $\ell_2$-error to $O(\delta)$ at a geometric rate when $m=O(k\log\frac{Lrn}{\delta^2})$. Experimental results corroborate our theoretical findings and show that: (i) our approach for the sparse case notably outperforms the existing provable algorithm sparse power factorization; (ii) leveraging the generative prior allows for precise image recovery in the MNIST dataset from a small number of quadratic measurements.

We study the phase retrieval problem, which solves quadratic system of equations, i.e., recovers a vector $\boldsymbol{x}\in \mathbb{R}^n$ from its magnitude measurements $y_i=|\langle \boldsymbol{a}_i, \boldsymbol{x}\rangle|, i=1,..., m$. We develop a gradient-like algorithm (referred to as RWF representing reshaped Wirtinger flow) by minimizing a nonconvex nonsmooth loss function. In comparison with existing nonconvex Wirtinger flow (WF) algorithm \cite{candes2015phase}, although the loss function becomes nonsmooth, it involves only the second power of variable and hence reduces the complexity. We show that for random Gaussian measurements, RWF enjoys geometric convergence to a global optimal point as long as the number $m$ of measurements is on the order of $n$, the dimension of the unknown $\boldsymbol{x}$. This improves the sample complexity of WF, and achieves the same sample complexity as truncated Wirtinger flow (TWF) \cite{chen2015solving}, but without truncation in gradient loop. Furthermore, RWF costs less computationally than WF, and runs faster numerically than both WF and TWF. We further develop the incremental (stochastic) reshaped Wirtinger flow (IRWF) and show that IRWF converges linearly to the true signal. We further establish performance guarantee of an existing Kaczmarz method for the phase retrieval problem based on its connection to IRWF. We also empirically demonstrate that IRWF outperforms existing ITWF algorithm (stochastic version of TWF) as well as other batch algorithms.

We consider the fundamental problem of solving quadratic systems of equations in $n$ variables, where $y_i = |\langle \boldsymbol{a}_i, \boldsymbol{x} \rangle|^2$, $i = 1, \ldots, m$ and $\boldsymbol{x} \in \mathbb{R}^n$ is unknown. We propose a novel method, which starting with an initial guess computed by means of a spectral method, proceeds by minimizing a nonconvex functional as in the Wirtinger flow approach. There are several key distinguishing features, most notably, a distinct objective functional and novel update rules, which operate in an adaptive fashion and drop terms bearing too much influence on the search direction. These careful selection rules provide a tighter initial guess, better descent directions, and thus enhanced practical performance. On the theoretical side, we prove that for certain unstructured models of quadratic systems, our algorithms return the correct solution in linear time, i.e. in time proportional to reading the data $\{\boldsymbol{a}_i\}$ and $\{y_i\}$ as soon as the ratio $m/n$ between the number of equations and unknowns exceeds a fixed numerical constant. We extend the theory to deal with noisy systems in which we only have $y_i \approx |\langle \boldsymbol{a}_i, \boldsymbol{x} \rangle|^2$ and prove that our algorithms achieve a statistical accuracy, which is nearly un-improvable. We complement our theoretical study with numerical examples showing that solving random quadratic systems is both computationally and statistically not much harder than solving linear systems of the same size---hence the title of this paper. For instance, we demonstrate empirically that the computational cost of our algorithm is about four times that of solving a least-squares problem of the same size.

This paper is concerned with finding a solution x to a quadratic system of equations y_i = |< a_i, x >|^2, i = 1, 2, ..., m. We prove that it is possible to solve unstructured quadratic systems in n variables exactly from O(n) equations in linear time, that is, in time proportional to reading and evaluating the data. This is accomplished by a novel procedure, which starting from an initial guess given by a spectral initialization procedure, attempts to minimize a non-convex objective. The proposed algorithm distinguishes from prior approaches by regularizing the initialization and descent procedures in an adaptive fashion, which discard terms bearing too much influence on the initial estimate or search directions. These careful selection rules---which effectively serve as a variance reduction scheme---provide a tighter initial guess, more robust descent directions, and thus enhanced practical performance. Further, this procedure also achieves a near-optimal statistical accuracy in the presence of noise. Finally, we demonstrate empirically that the computational cost of our algorithm is about four times that of solving a least-squares problem of the same size.