Rapid, Robust, and Reliable Blind Deconvolution via Nonconvex Optimization

We study the question of reconstructing two signals $f$ and $g$ from their convolution $y = f\ast g$. This problem, known as {\em blind deconvolution}, pervades many areas of science and technology, including astronomy, medical imaging, optics, and wireless communications. A key challenge of this intricate non-convex optimization problem is that it might exhibit many local minima. We present an efficient numerical algorithm that is guaranteed to recover the exact solution, when the number of measurements is (up to log-factors) slightly larger than the information-theoretical minimum, and under reasonable conditions on $f$ and $g$. The proposed regularized gradient descent algorithm converges at a geometric rate and is provably robust in the presence of noise. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first blind deconvolution algorithm that is numerically efficient, robust against noise, and comes with rigorous recovery guarantees under certain subspace conditions. Moreover, numerical experiments do not only provide empirical verification of our theory, but they also demonstrate that our method yields excellent performance even in situations beyond our theoretical framework

Regularized Gradient Descent: A Nonconvex Recipe for Fast Joint Blind Deconvolution and Demixing

We study the question of extracting a sequence of functions $\{\boldsymbol{f}_i, \boldsymbol{g}_i\}_{i=1}^s$ from observing only the sum of their convolutions, i.e., from $\boldsymbol{y} = \sum_{i=1}^s \boldsymbol{f}_i\ast \boldsymbol{g}_i$. While convex optimization techniques are able to solve this joint blind deconvolution-demixing problem provably and robustly under certain conditions, for medium-size or large-size problems we need computationally faster methods without sacrificing the benefits of mathematical rigor that come with convex methods. In this paper, we present a non-convex algorithm which guarantees exact recovery under conditions that are competitive with convex optimization methods, with the additional advantage of being computationally much more efficient. Our two-step algorithm converges to the global minimum linearly and is also robust in the presence of additive noise. While the derived performance bounds are suboptimal in terms of the information-theoretic limit, numerical simulations show remarkable performance even if the number of measurements is close to the number of degrees of freedom. We discuss an application of the proposed framework in wireless communications in connection with the Internet-of-Things.Comment: Accepted to Information and Inference: a Journal of the IM

Sensitivity analysis of oscillator models in the space of phase-response curves: Oscillators as open systems

Oscillator models are central to the study of system properties such as entrainment or synchronization. Due to their nonlinear nature, few system-theoretic tools exist to analyze those models. The paper develops a sensitivity analysis for phase-response curves, a fundamental one-dimensional phase reduction of oscillator models. The proposed theoretical and numerical analysis tools are illustrated on several system-theoretic questions and models arising in the biology of cellular rhythms

Complex-network analysis of combinatorial spaces: The NK landscape case

We propose a network characterization of combinatorial fitness landscapes by adapting the notion of inherent networks proposed for energy surfaces. We use the well-known family of NK landscapes as an example. In our case the inherent network is the graph whose vertices represent the local maxima in the landscape, and the edges account for the transition probabilities between their corresponding basins of attraction. We exhaustively extracted such networks on representative NK landscape instances, and performed a statistical characterization of their properties. We found that most of these network properties are related to the search difficulty on the underlying NK landscapes with varying values of K.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:0810.3492, arXiv:0810.348