Vincent Duval

Vincent Duval, Gabriel Peyré

This paper studies sparse spikes deconvolution over the space of measures. We focus our attention to the recovery properties of the support of the measure, i.e. the location of the Dirac masses. For non-degenerate sums of Diracs, we show that, when the signal-to-noise ratio is large enough, total variation regularization (which is the natural extension of the L1 norm of vectors to the setting of measures) recovers the exact same number of Diracs. We also show that both the locations and the heights of these Diracs converge toward those of the input measure when the noise drops to zero. The exact speed of convergence is governed by a specific dual certificate, which can be computed by solving a linear system. We draw connections between the support of the recovered measure on a continuous domain and on a discretized grid. We show that when the signal-to-noise level is large enough, the solution of the discretized problem is supported on pairs of Diracs which are neighbors of the Diracs of the input measure. This gives a precise description of the convergence of the solution of the discretized problem toward the solution of the continuous grid-free problem, as the grid size tends to zero.

Guillaume Carlier, Vincent Duval, Gabriel Peyré et al.

Replacing positivity constraints by an entropy barrier is popular to approximate solutions of linear programs. In the special case of the optimal transport problem, this technique dates back to the early work of Schrödinger. This approach has recently been used successfully to solve optimal transport related problems in several applied fields such as imaging sciences, machine learning and social sciences. The main reason for this success is that, in contrast to linear programming solvers, the resulting algorithms are highly parallelizable and take advantage of the geometry of the computational grid (e.g. an image or a triangulated mesh). The first contribution of this article is the proof of the $Γ$-convergence of the entropic regularized optimal transport problem towards the Monge-Kantorovich problem for the squared Euclidean norm cost function. This implies in particular the convergence of the optimal entropic regularized transport plan towards an optimal transport plan as the entropy vanishes. Optimal transport distances are also useful to define gradient flows as a limit of implicit Euler steps according to the transportation distance. Our second contribution is a proof that implicit steps according to the entropic regularized distance converge towards the original gradient flow when both the step size and the entropic penalty vanish (in some controlled way).

Paul Catala, Vincent Duval, Gabriel Peyré

We propose a new solver for the sparse spikes deconvolution problem over the space of Radon measures. A common approach to off-the-grid deconvolution considers semidefinite (SDP) relaxations of the total variation (the total mass of the absolute value of the measure) minimization problem. The direct resolution of this SDP is however intractable for large scale settings, since the problem size grows as $f_c^{2d}$ where $f_c$ is the cutoff frequency of the filter and $d$ the ambient dimension. Our first contribution introduces a penalized formulation of this semidefinite lifting, which has low-rank solutions. Our second contribution is a conditional gradient optimization scheme with non-convex updates. This algorithm leverages both the low-rank and the convolutive structure of the problem, resulting in an $O(f_c^d \log f_c)$ complexity per iteration. Numerical simulations are promising and show that the algorithm converges in exactly $r$ steps, $r$ being the number of Diracs composing the solution.

Quentin Denoyelle, Vincent Duval, Gabriel Peyré et al.

This paper showcases the theoretical and numerical performance of the Sliding Frank-Wolfe, which is a novel optimization algorithm to solve the BLASSO sparse spikes super-resolution problem. The BLASSO is a continuous (i.e. off-the-grid or grid-less) counterpart to the well-known 1 sparse regularisation method (also known as LASSO or Basis Pursuit). Our algorithm is a variation on the classical Frank-Wolfe (also known as conditional gradient) which follows a recent trend of interleaving convex optimization updates (corresponding to adding new spikes) with non-convex optimization steps (corresponding to moving the spikes). Our main theoretical result is that this algorithm terminates in a finite number of steps under a mild non-degeneracy hypothesis. We then target applications of this method to several instances of single molecule fluorescence imaging modalities, among which certain approaches rely heavily on the inversion of a Laplace transform. Our second theoretical contribution is the proof of the exact support recovery property of the BLASSO to invert the 1-D Laplace transform in the case of positive spikes. On the numerical side, we conclude this paper with an extensive study of the practical performance of the Sliding Frank-Wolfe on different instantiations of single molecule fluorescence imaging, including convolutive and non-convolutive (Laplace-like) operators. This shows the versatility and superiority of this method with respect to alternative sparse recovery technics.

Jean-David Benamou, Vincent Duval

We present an adaptation of the MA-LBR scheme to the Monge-Amp{è}re equation with second boundary value condition, provided the target is a convex set. This yields a fast adaptive method to numerically solve the Optimal Transport problem between two absolutely continuous measures, the second of which has convex support. The proposed numerical method actually captures a specific Brenier solution which is minimal in some sense. We prove the convergence of the method as the grid stepsize vanishes and we show with numerical experiments that it is able to reproduce subtle properties of the Optimal Transport problem.

Jérémy Bleyer, Guillaume Carlier, Vincent Duval et al.

Upper bound limit analysis allows one to evaluate directly the ultimate load of structures without performing a cumbersome incremental analysis. In order to numerically apply this method to thin plates in bending, several authors have proposed to use various finite elements discretizations. We provide in this paper a mathematical analysis which ensures the convergence of the finite element method, even with finite elements with discontinuous derivatives such as the quadratic 6 node Lagrange triangles and the cubic Hermite triangles. More precisely, we prove the $Γ$-convergence of the discretized problems towards the continuous limit analysis problem. Numerical results illustrate the relevance of this analysis for the yield design of both homogeneous and non-homogeneous materials.

Majid Arthaud, Antonin Chambolle, Vincent Duval

We introduce a variational approach for extracting curves between a list of possible endpoints, based on the discretization of an energy and Smirnov's decomposition theorem for vector fields. It is used to design a bi-level minimization approach to automatically extract curves and 1D structures from an image, which is mostly unsupervised. We extend then the method to curvature-dependent energies, using a now classical lifting of the curves in the space of positions and orientations equipped with an appropriate sub-Riemanian or Finslerian metric.

Vincent Duval

In a recent article, Schiebinger et al. provided sufficient conditions for the noiseless recovery of a signal made of M Dirac masses given 2M + 1 observations of, e.g. , its convolution with a Gaussian filter, using the Basis Pursuit for measures. In the present work, we show that a variant of their criterion provides a necessary and sufficient condition for the Non-Degenerate Source Condition (NDSC) which was introduced by Duval and Peyr{é} to ensure support stability in super-resolution. We provide sufficient conditions which, for instance, hold unconditionally for the Laplace kernel provided one has at least 2M measurements. For the Gaussian filter, we show that those conditions are fulfilled in two very different configurations: samples which approximate the uniform Lebesgue measure or, more surprisingly, samples which are all confined in a sufficiently small interval.

Charles Dossal, Vincent Duval, Clarice Poon

This article considers the use of total variation minimization for the recovery of a superposition of point sources from samples of its Fourier transform along radial lines. We present a numerical algorithm for the computation of solutions to this infinite dimensional problem. The theoretical results of this paper make precise the link between the sampling operator and the recoverability of the point sources.