We study the approximate message-passing decoder for sparse superposition coding on the additive white Gaussian noise channel and extend our preliminary work. We use heuristic statistical-physics-based tools, such as the cavity and the replica methods, for the statistical analysis of the scheme. While superposition codes asymptotically reach the Shannon capacity, we show that our iterative decoder is limited by a phase transition similar to the one that happens in low density parity check codes. We consider two solutions to this problem, that both allow to reach the Shannon capacity: 1) a power allocation strategy and 2) the use of spatial coupling, a novelty for these codes that appears to be promising. We present, in particular, simulations, suggesting that spatial coupling is more robust and allows for better reconstruction at finite code lengths. Finally, we show empirically that the use of a fast Hadamard-based operator allows for an efficient reconstruction, both in terms of computational time and memory, and the ability to deal with very large messages.
The AMP algorithm, which stands at the roots of our approach, is a simple relaxation of loopy BP. While the principle behind AMP has been used for a long time in physics under the name of Thouless-Anderson-Palmer equations @cite_28 , the present form has been originally derived for compressed sensing @cite_22 @cite_17 @cite_41 and is naturally applied to sparse superposition codes as this scheme can be interpreted as a compressed sensing problem with structured sparsity. The state evolution technique @cite_12 is unfortunately not yet fully rigorous for the present AMP approach, due to the structured sparsity of the signal, but in spite of that, we conjecture that it is exact.
@cite_22 @cite_28 @cite_41 @cite_12 @cite_17
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“Approximate message passing” (AMP) algorithms have proved to be effective in reconstructing sparse signals from a small number of incoherent linear measurements. Extensive numerical experiments further showed that their dynamics is accurately tracked by a simple one-dimensional iteration termed state evolution. In this paper, we provide rigorous foundation to state evolution. We prove that indeed it holds asymptotically in the large system limit for sensing matrices with independent and identically distributed Gaussian entries. While our focus is on message passing algorithms for compressed sensing, the analysis extends beyond this setting, to a general class of algorithms on dense graphs. In this context, state evolution plays the role that density evolution has for sparse graphs. The proof technique is fundamentally different from the standard approach to density evolution, in that it copes with a large number of short cycles in the underlying factor graph. It relies instead on a conditioning technique recently developed by Erwin Bolthausen in the context of spin glass theory. We consider the estimation of a random vector observed through a linear transform followed by a componentwise probabilistic measurement channel. Although such linear mixing estimation problems are generally highly non-convex, Gaussian approximations of belief propagation (BP) have proven to be computationally attractive and highly effective in a range of applications. Recently, Bayati and Montanari have provided a rigorous and extremely general analysis of a large class of approximate message passing (AMP) algorithms that includes many Gaussian approximate BP methods. This paper extends their analysis to a larger class of algorithms to include what we call generalized AMP (G-AMP). G-AMP incorporates general (possibly non-AWGN) measurement channels. Similar to the AWGN output channel case, we show that the asymptotic behavior of the G-AMP algorithm under large i.i.d. Gaussian transform matrices is described by a simple set of state evolution (SE) equations. The general SE equations recover and extend several earlier results, including SE equations for approximate BP on general output channels by Guo and Wang. Given a high-dimensional data matrix @math , Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithms construct sequences of vectors @math , @math , indexed by @math by iteratively applying @math or @math , and suitable non-linear functions, which depend on the specific application. Special instances of this approach have been developed --among other applications-- for compressed sensing reconstruction, robust regression, Bayesian estimation, low-rank matrix recovery, phase retrieval, and community detection in graphs. For certain classes of random matrices @math , AMP admits an asymptotically exact description in the high-dimensional limit @math , which goes under the name of state evolution.' Earlier work established state evolution for separable non-linearities (under certain regularity conditions). Nevertheless, empirical work demonstrated several important applications that require non-separable functions. In this paper we generalize state evolution to Lipschitz continuous non-separable nonlinearities, for Gaussian matrices @math . Our proof makes use of Bolthausen's conditioning technique along with several approximation arguments. In particular, we introduce a modified algorithm (called LAMP for Long AMP) which is of independent interest. The approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm originally proposed by Donoho, Maleki, and Montanari yields a computationally attractive solution to the usual l 1 -regularized least-squares problem faced in compressed sensing, whose solution is known to be robust to the signal distribution. When the signal is drawn i.i.d from a marginal distribution that is not least-favorable, better performance can be attained using a Bayesian variation of AMP. The latter, however, assumes that the distribution is perfectly known. In this paper, we navigate the space between these two extremes by modeling the signal as i.i.d Bernoulli-Gaussian (BG) with unknown prior sparsity, mean, and variance, and the noise as zero-mean Gaussian with unknown variance, and we simultaneously reconstruct the signal while learning the prior signal and noise parameters. To accomplish this task, we embed the BG-AMP algorithm within an expectation-maximization (EM) framework. Numerical experiments confirm the excellent performance of our proposed EM-BG-AMP on a range of signal types.12