The Mutual Information in Random Linear Estimation Beyond i.i.d. Matrices

There has been definite progress recently in proving the variational single-letter formula given by the heuristic replica method for various estimation problems. In particular, the replica formula for the mutual information in the case of noisy linear estimation with random i.i.d. matrices, a problem with applications ranging from compressed sensing to statistics, has been proven rigorously. In this contribution we go beyond the restrictive i.i.d. matrix assumption and discuss the formula proposed by Takeda, Uda, Kabashima and later by Tulino, Verdu, Caire and Shamai who used the replica method. Using the recently introduced adaptive interpolation method and random matrix theory, we prove this formula for a relevant large sub-class of rotationally invariant matrices.Comment: Presented at the 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT

Generalized Approximate Message-Passing Decoder for Universal Sparse Superposition Codes

Sparse superposition (SS) codes were originally proposed as a capacity-achieving communication scheme over the additive white Gaussian noise channel (AWGNC) [1]. Very recently, it was discovered that these codes are universal, in the sense that they achieve capacity over any memoryless channel under generalized approximate message-passing (GAMP) decoding [2], although this decoder has never been stated for SS codes. In this contribution we introduce the GAMP decoder for SS codes, we confirm empirically the universality of this communication scheme through its study on various channels and we provide the main analysis tools: state evolution and potential. We also compare the performance of GAMP with the Bayes-optimal MMSE decoder. We empirically illustrate that despite the presence of a phase transition preventing GAMP to reach the optimal performance, spatial coupling allows to boost the performance that eventually tends to capacity in a proper limit. We also prove that, in contrast with the AWGNC case, SS codes for binary input channels have a vanishing error floor in the limit of large codewords. Moreover, the performance of Hadamard-based encoders is assessed for practical implementations

The adaptive interpolation method for proving replica formulas. Applications to the Curie-Weiss and Wigner spike models

In this contribution we give a pedagogic introduction to the newly introduced adaptive interpolation method to prove in a simple and unified way replica formulas for Bayesian optimal inference problems. Many aspects of this method can already be explained at the level of the simple Curie-Weiss spin system. This provides a new method of solution for this model which does not appear to be known. We then generalize this analysis to a paradigmatic inference problem, namely rank-one matrix estimation, also refered to as the Wigner spike model in statistics. We give many pointers to the recent literature where the method has been succesfully applied

Approximate message passing for nonconvex sparse regularization with stability and asymptotic analysis

We analyse a linear regression problem with nonconvex regularization called smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) under an overcomplete Gaussian basis for Gaussian random data. We propose an approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm considering nonconvex regularization, namely SCAD-AMP, and analytically show that the stability condition corresponds to the de Almeida--Thouless condition in spin glass literature. Through asymptotic analysis, we show the correspondence between the density evolution of SCAD-AMP and the replica symmetric solution. Numerical experiments confirm that for a sufficiently large system size, SCAD-AMP achieves the optimal performance predicted by the replica method. Through replica analysis, a phase transition between replica symmetric (RS) and replica symmetry breaking (RSB) region is found in the parameter space of SCAD. The appearance of the RS region for a nonconvex penalty is a significant advantage that indicates the region of smooth landscape of the optimization problem. Furthermore, we analytically show that the statistical representation performance of the SCAD penalty is better than that of L1-based methods, and the minimum representation error under RS assumption is obtained at the edge of the RS/RSB phase. The correspondence between the convergence of the existing coordinate descent algorithm and RS/RSB transition is also indicated