Recovery performance of PhaseLift for phase retrieval from coded diffraction patterns

The PhaseLift algorithm is an effective convex method for solving the phase retrieval problem from Fourier measurements with coded diffraction patterns (CDPs). While exact reconstruction guarantees are well-established in the noiseless case, the stability of recovery under noise remains less well understood. In particular, when the measurements are corrupted by an additive noise vector (Formula presented) (Formula presented), existing recovery bounds scale on the order of (Formula presented) (Formula presented), which is conjectured to be suboptimal. More recently, Soltanolkotabi conjectured that the optimal PhaseLift recovery bound should scale with the average noise magnitude, that is, on the order of (Formula presented) (Formula presented). However, establishing this theoretically is considerably more challenging and has remained an open problem. In this paper, we focus on this conjecture and prove that under adversarial noise, the recovery error of PhaseLift is bounded by (Formula presented) (Formula presented). Here, (Formula presented) (Formula presented) is the signals we aim to recover. Moreover, for mean-zero sub-Gaussian noise vector (Formula presented) (Formula presented), an upper error bound and its corresponding minimax lower bound are also provided. Our results represent a significant step toward Soltanolkotabi’s conjecture, offering new insights into the stability of PhaseLift under noisy CDP measurements.