We derive and analyze a new variant of the iteratively regularized Landweber iteration, for solving linear and nonlinear ill-posed inverse problems. The method takes into account training data, which are used to estimate the interior of a black box, which is used to define the iteration process. We prove convergence and stability for the scheme in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. These theoretical results are complemented by some numerical experiments for solving linear inverse problems for the Radon transform and a nonlinear inverse problem for Schlieren tomography. 

In this work, we consider methods for solving large-scale optimization problems with a possibly nonsmooth objective function. The key idea is to first parametrize a class of optimization methods using a generic iterative scheme involving only linear operations and applications of proximal operators. This scheme contains some modern primal-dual first-order algorithms like the Douglas-Rachford and hybrid gradient methods as special cases. Moreover, we show weak convergence of the iterates to an optimal point for a new method which also belongs to this class. Next, we interpret the generic scheme as a neural network and use unsupervised training to learn the best set of parameters for a specific class of objective functions while imposing a fixed number of iterations. In contrast to other approaches of "learning to optimize," we present an approach which learns parameters only in the set of convergent schemes. Finally, we illustrate the approach on optimization problems arising in tomographic reconstruction and image deconvolution, and train optimization algorithms for optimal performance given a fixed number of iterations.

The possibilities of exploiting the special structure of d.c. programs, which consist of optimising the difference of convex functions, are currently more or less limited to variants of the DCA proposed by Pham Dinh Tao and Le Thi Hoai An in 1997. These assume that either the convex or the concave part, or both, are evaluated by one of their subgradients. In this paper we propose an algorithm which allows the evaluation of both the concave and the convex part by their proximal points. Additionally, we allow a smooth part, which is evaluated via its gradient. In the spirit of primal-dual splitting algorithms, the concave part might be the composition of a concave function with a linear operator, which are, however, evaluated separately. For this algorithm we show that every cluster point is a solution of the optimisation problem. Furthermore, we show the connection to the Toland dual problem and prove a descent property for the objective function values of a primal-dual formulation of the problem. Convergence of the iterates is shown if this objective function satisfies the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz property. In the last part, we apply the algorithm to an image processing model.