No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we clarify the relations between the existing sets of regularity conditions for convergence rates of nonparametric indirect regression (NPIR) and nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV) regression models. We establish minimax risk lower bounds in mean integrated squared error loss for the NPIR and the NPIV models under two basic regularity conditions that allow for both mildly ill-posed and severely ill-posed cases. We show that both a simple projection estimator for the NPIR model, and a sieve minimum distance estimator for the NPIV model, can achieve the minimax risk lower bounds, and are rate-optimal uniformly over a large class of structure functions, allowing for mildly ill-posed and severely ill-posed cases.
This paper discusses the properties of certain risk estimators recently proposed to choose regularization parameters in ill-posed problems. A simple approach is Steins unbiased risk estimator (SURE), which estimates the risk in the data space, while a recent modification (GSURE) estimates the risk in the space of the unknown variable. It seems intuitive that the latter is more appropriate for ill-posed problems, since the properties in the data space do not tell much about the quality of the reconstruction. We provide theoretical studies of both estimators for linear Tikhonov regularization in a finite dimensional setting and estimate the quality of the risk estimators, which also leads to asymptotic convergence results as the dimension of the problem tends to infinity. Unlike previous papers, who studied image processing problems with a very low degree of ill-posedness, we are interested in the behavior of the risk estimators for increasing ill-posedness. Interestingly, our theoretical results indicate that the quality of the GSURE risk can deteriorate asymptotically for ill-posed problems, which is confirmed by a detailed numerical study. The latter shows that in many cases the GSURE estimator leads to extremely small regularization parameters, which obviously cannot stabilize the reconstruction. Similar but less severe issues with respect to robustness also appear for the SURE estimator, which in comparison to the rather conservative discrepancy principle leads to the conclusion that regularization parameter choice based on unbiased risk estimation is not a reliable procedure for ill-posed problems. A similar numerical study for sparsity regularization demonstrates that the same issue appears in nonlinear variational regularization approaches.
Classical optimization techniques often formulate the feasibility of the problems as set, equality or inequality constraints. However, explicitly designing these constraints is indeed challenging for complex real-world applications and too strict constraints may even lead to intractable optimization problems. On the other hand, it is still hard to incorporate data-dependent information into conventional numerical iterations. To partially address the above limits and inspired by the leader-follower gaming perspective, this work first introduces a bilevel-type formulation to jointly investigate the feasibility and optimality of nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems. Then we develop an algorithmic framework to couple forward-backward proximal computations to optimize our established bilevel leader-follower model. We prove its convergence and estimate the convergence rate. Furthermore, a learning-based extension is developed, in which we establish an unrolling strategy to incorporate data-dependent network architectures into our iterations. Fortunately, it can be proved that by introducing some mild checking conditions, all our original convergence results can still be preserved for this learnable extension. As a nontrivial byproduct, we demonstrate how to apply this ensemble-like methodology to address different low-level vision tasks. Extensive experiments verify the theoretical results and show the advantages of our method against existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Ill-posed linear inverse problems appear in many image processing applications, such as deblurring, super-resolution and compressed sensing. Many restoration strategies involve minimizing a cost function, which is composed of fidelity and prior terms, balanced by a regularization parameter. While a vast amount of research has been focused on different prior models, the fidelity term is almost always chosen to be the least squares (LS) objective, that encourages fitting the linearly transformed optimization variable to the observations. In this paper, we examine a different fidelity term, which has been implicitly used by the recently proposed iterative denoising and backward projections (IDBP) framework. This term encourages agreement between the projection of the optimization variable onto the row space of the linear operator and the pseudo-inverse of the linear operator (back-projection) applied on the observations. We analytically examine the difference between the two fidelity terms for Tikhonov regularization and identify cases (such as a badly conditioned linear operator) where the new term has an advantage over the standard LS one. Moreover, we demonstrate empirically that the behavior of the two induced cost functions for sophisticated convex and non-convex priors, such as total-variation, BM3D, and deep generative models, correlates with the obtained theoretical analysis.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of an entropic projection method for the iterative regularization of linear ill-posed problems. We derive a closed form solution for the iterates and analyze their convergence behaviour both in a case of reconstructing general nonnegative unknowns as well as for the sake of recovering probability distributions. Moreover, we discuss several variants of the algorithm and relations to other methods in the literature. The effectiveness of the approach is studied numerically in several examples.
Many applications in science and engineering require the solution of large linear discrete ill-posed problems that are obtained by the discretization of a Fredholm integral equation of the first kind in several space-dimensions. The matrix that defines these problems is very ill-conditioned and generally numerically singular, and the right-hand side, which represents measured data, typically is contaminated by measurement error. Straightforward solution of these problems generally is not meaningful due to severe error propagation. Tikhonov regularization seeks to alleviate this difficulty by replacing the given linear discrete ill-posed problem by a penalized least-squares problem, whose solution is less sensitive to the error in the right-hand side and to round-off errors introduced during the computations. This paper discusses the construction of penalty terms that are determined by solving a matrix-nearness problem. These penalty terms allow partial transformation to standard form of Tikhonov regularization problems that stem from the discretization of integral equations on a cube in several space-dimensions.