The Star Geometry of Critic-Based Regularizer Learning

TL;DR

This paper explores the geometric structure of critic-based learned regularizers, specifically gauges of star-shaped bodies, using star geometry and dual Brunn-Minkowski theory to understand their properties and optimal forms.

Contribution

It introduces a geometric framework for analyzing critic-based regularizer learning, focusing on gauges of star-shaped bodies, and connects this to neural network architectures and statistical distances.

Findings

Exact expressions for optimal regularizers in certain cases.

Identification of neural network architectures that produce star body gauges.

Insights into the geometric properties of learned regularizers.

Abstract

Variational regularization is a classical technique to solve statistical inference tasks and inverse problems, with modern data-driven approaches parameterizing regularizers via deep neural networks showcasing impressive empirical performance. Recent works along these lines learn task-dependent regularizers. This is done by integrating information about the measurements and ground-truth data in an unsupervised, critic-based loss function, where the regularizer attributes low values to likely data and high values to unlikely data. However, there is little theory about the structure of regularizers learned via this process and how it relates to the two data distributions. To make progress on this challenge, we initiate a study of optimizing critic-based loss functions to learn regularizers over a particular family of regularizers: gauges (or Minkowski functionals) of star-shaped bodies. This family contains regularizers that are commonly employed in practice and shares properties with regularizers parameterized by deep neural networks. We specifically investigate critic-based losses derived from variational representations of statistical distances between probability measures. By leveraging tools from star geometry and dual Brunn-Minkowski theory, we illustrate how these losses can be interpreted as dual mixed volumes that depend on the data distribution. This allows us to derive exact expressions for the optimal regularizer in certain cases. Finally, we identify which neural network architectures give rise to such star body gauges and when do such regularizers have favorable properties for optimization. More broadly, this work highlights how the tools of star geometry can aid in understanding the geometry of unsupervised regularizer learning.