Convex reconstruction from structured measurements

Convex signal reconstruction is the art of solving ill-posed inverse problems via convex optimization. It is applicable to a great number of problems from engineering, signal analysis, quantum mechanics and many more. The most prominent example is compressed sensing, where one aims at reconstructing sparse vectors from an under-determined set of linear measurements. In many cases, one can prove rigorous performance guarantees for these convex algorithms. The combination of practical importance and theoretical tractability has directed a significant amount of attention to this young field of applied mathematics. However, rigorous proofs are usually only available for certain "generic cases"---for instance situations, where all measurements are represented by random Gaussian vectors. The focus of this thesis is to overcome this drawback by devising mathematical proof techniques can be applied to more "structured" measurements. Here, structure can have various meanings. E.g. it could refer to the type of measurements that occur in a given concrete application. Or, more abstractly, structure in the sense that a measurement ensemble is small and exhibits rich geometric features. The main focus of this thesis is phase retrieval: The problem of inferring phase information from amplitude measurements. This task is ubiquitous in, for instance, in crystallography, astronomy and diffraction imaging. Throughout this project, a series of increasingly better convex reconstruction guarantees have been established. On the one hand, we improved results for certain measurement models that mimic typical experimental setups in diffraction imaging. On the other hand, we identified spherical t-designs as a general purpose tool for the derandomization of data recovery schemes. Loosely speaking, a t-design is a finite configuration of vectors that is "evenly distributed" in the sense that it reproduces the first 2t moments of the uniform measure. Such configurations have been studied, for instance, in algebraic combinatorics, coding theory, and quantum information. We have shown that already spherical 4-designs allow for proving close-to-optimal convex reconstruction guarantees for phase retrieval. The success of this program depends on explicit constructions of spherical t-designs. In this regard, we have studied the design properties of stabilizer states. These are configurations of vectors that feature prominently in quantum information theory. Mathematically, they can be related to objects in discrete symplectic vector spaces---a structure we use heavily. We have shown that these vectors form a spherical 3-design and are, in some sense, close to a spherical 4-design. Putting these efforts together, we establish tight bounds on phase retrieval from stabilizer measurements. While working on the derandomization of phase retrieval, I obtained a number of results on other convex signal reconstruction problems. These include compressed sensing from anisotropic measurements, non-negative compressed sensing in the presence of noise and identifying improved convex regularizers for low rank matrix reconstruction. Going even further, the mathematical methods I used to tackle ill-posed inverse problems can be applied to a plethora of problems from quantum information theory. In particular, the causal structure behind Bell inequalities, new ways to compare experiments to fault-tolerance thresholds in quantum error correction, a novel benchmark for quantum state tomography via Bayesian estimation, and the task of distinguishing quantum states.