James G. Nagy

Silvia Gazzola, Per Christian Hansen, James G. Nagy

This paper describes a new MATLAB software package of iterative regularization methods and test problems for large-scale linear inverse problems. The software package, called IR Tools, serves two related purposes: we provide implementations of a range of iterative solvers, including several recently proposed methods that are not available elsewhere, and we provide a set of large-scale test problems in the form of discretizations of 2D linear inverse problems. The solvers include iterative regularization methods where the regularization is due to the semi-convergence of the iterations, Tikhonov-type formulations where the regularization is explicitly formulated in the form of a regularization term, and methods that can impose bound constraints on the computed solutions. All the iterative methods are implemented in a very flexible fashion that allows the problem's coefficient matrix to be available as a (sparse) matrix, a function handle, or an object. The most basic call to all of the various iterative methods requires only this matrix and the right hand side vector; if the method uses any special stopping criteria, regularization parameters, etc., then default values are set automatically by the code. Moreover, through the use of an optional input structure, the user can also have full control of any of the algorithm parameters. The test problems represent realistic large-scale problems found in image reconstruction and several other applications. Numerical examples illustrate the various algorithms and test problems available in this package.

Clarissa Garvey, Chang Meng, James G. Nagy

In this paper we propose an approach to approximate a truncated singular value decomposition of a large structured matrix. By first decomposing the matrix into a sum of Kronecker products, our approach can be used to approximate a large number of singular values and vectors more efficiently than other well known schemes, such as randomized matrix algorithms or iterative algorithms based on Golub-Kahan bidiagonalization. We provide theoretical results and numerical experiments to demonstrate the accuracy of our approximation and show how the approximation can be used to solve large scale ill-posed inverse problems, either as an approximate filtering method, or as a preconditioner to accelerate iterative algorithms.

Toluwani Okunola, Mirjeta Pasha, Misha E. Kilmer et al.

Many practical imaging systems suffer from uncertainty in acquisition geometry -- such as projection angles in computed tomography or sensor positions in photoacoustic tomography -- leading to nonlinear inverse problems that require joint estimation of both the image and the forward model parameters. Standard approaches that assume a known linear forward operator fail to account for these uncertainties, resulting in significant reconstruction artifacts. We propose a nonlinear recycled majorization-minimization generalized Krylov subspace (NL-RMM-GKS) framework for large-scale inverse problems with uncertain forward operators. The method extends MM-GKS to nonlinear settings by combining majorization-minimization for nonsmooth regularization with Krylov subspace projection and subspace recycling, ensuring bounded memory usage. Two complementary formulations are developed: an alternating minimization approach that alternates between image updates and Gauss-Newton parameter estimation, and a variable projection approach that eliminates the image variable and optimizes directly over the parameters using inexact inner solves. We further introduce streaming variants that process data sequentially, enabling reconstruction from large or dynamically acquired datasets without storing the full operator. For dynamic problems, we incorporate two temporal regularization strategies -- optical flow and anisotropic total variation -- as plug-in choices within the framework. We carry out rigorous numerical experiments in fan-beam computed tomography and photoacoustic tomography to demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves high-quality reconstructions with bounded memory requirements, making it suitable for large-scale dynamic imaging problems.

Kelvin Kan, James G Nagy, Lars Ruthotto

We demonstrate the ability of hybrid regularization methods to automatically avoid the double descent phenomenon arising in the training of random feature models (RFM). The hallmark feature of the double descent phenomenon is a spike in the regularization gap at the interpolation threshold, i.e. when the number of features in the RFM equals the number of training samples. To close this gap, the hybrid method considered in our paper combines the respective strengths of the two most common forms of regularization: early stopping and weight decay. The scheme does not require hyperparameter tuning as it automatically selects the stopping iteration and weight decay hyperparameter by using generalized cross-validation (GCV). This also avoids the necessity of a dedicated validation set. While the benefits of hybrid methods have been well-documented for ill-posed inverse problems, our work presents the first use case in machine learning. To expose the need for regularization and motivate hybrid methods, we perform detailed numerical experiments inspired by image classification. In those examples, the hybrid scheme successfully avoids the double descent phenomenon and yields RFMs whose generalization is comparable with classical regularization approaches whose hyperparameters are tuned optimally using the test data. We provide our MATLAB codes for implementing the numerical experiments in this paper at https://github.com/EmoryMLIP/HybridRFM.

Chao Wang, Min Tao, Chen-Nee Chuah et al.

In this paper, we study the L1/L2 minimization on the gradient for imaging applications. Several recent works have demonstrated that L1/L2 is better than the L1 norm when approximating the L0 norm to promote sparsity. Consequently, we postulate that applying L1/L2 on the gradient is better than the classic total variation (the L1 norm on the gradient) to enforce the sparsity of the image gradient. To verify our hypothesis, we consider a constrained formulation to reveal empirical evidence on the superiority of L1/L2 over L1 when recovering piecewise constant signals from low-frequency measurements. Numerically, we design a specific splitting scheme, under which we can prove subsequential and global convergence for the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) under certain conditions. Experimentally, we demonstrate visible improvements of L1/L2 over L1 and other nonconvex regularizations for image recovery from low-frequency measurements and two medical applications of MRI and CT reconstruction. All the numerical results show the efficiency of our proposed approach.

Chao Wang, Min Tao, James Nagy et al.

In this paper, we consider minimizing the L1/L2 term on the gradient for a limited-angle scanning problem in computed tomography (CT) reconstruction. We design a specific splitting framework for an unconstrained optimization model so that the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) has guaranteed convergence under certain conditions. In addition, we incorporate a box constraint that is reasonable for imaging applications, and the convergence for the additional box constraint can also be established. Numerical results on both synthetic and experimental datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approaches, showing significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods in the limited-angle CT reconstruction.