Hybrid Physical-Deep Learning Model for Astronomical Inverse Problems

We present a Bayesian machine learning architecture that combines a physically motivated parametrization and an analytic error model for the likelihood with a deep generative model providing a powerful data-driven prior for complex signals. This combination yields an interpretable and differentiable generative model, allows the incorporation of prior knowledge, and can be utilized for observations with different data quality without having to retrain the deep network. We demonstrate our approach with an example of astronomical source separation in current imaging data, yielding a physical and interpretable model of astronomical scenes.

Block-Simultaneous Direction Method of Multipliers: A proximal primal-dual splitting algorithm for nonconvex problems with multiple constraints

We introduce a generalization of the linearized Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers to optimize a real-valued function $f$ of multiple arguments with potentially multiple constraints $g_\circ$ on each of them. The function $f$ may be nonconvex as long as it is convex in every argument, while the constraints $g_\circ$ need to be convex but not smooth. If $f$ is smooth, the proposed Block-Simultaneous Direction Method of Multipliers (bSDMM) can be interpreted as a proximal analog to inexact coordinate descent methods under constraints. Unlike alternative approaches for joint solvers of multiple-constraint problems, we do not require linear operators $L$ of a constraint function $g(L\ \cdot)$ to be invertible or linked between each other. bSDMM is well-suited for a range of optimization problems, in particular for data analysis, where $f$ is the likelihood function of a model and $L$ could be a transformation matrix describing e.g. finite differences or basis transforms. We apply bSDMM to the Non-negative Matrix Factorization task of a hyperspectral unmixing problem and demonstrate convergence and effectiveness of multiple constraints on both matrix factors. The algorithms are implemented in python and released as an open-source package.