Learning-based methods, and in particular deep neural networks, have emerged as highly successful and universal tools for image and signal recovery and restoration. They achieve state-of-the-art results on tasks ranging from image denoising, image compression, and image reconstruction from few and noisy measurements. They are starting to be used in important imaging technologies, for example in GEs newest computational tomography scanners and in the newest generation of the iPhone.

The field has a range of theoretical and practical questions that remain unanswered. In particular, learning and neural network-based approaches often lack the guarantees of traditional physics-based methods. Further, while superior on average, learning-based methods can make drastic reconstruction errors, such as hallucinating a tumor in an MRI reconstruction or turning a pixelated picture of Obama into a white male.

This virtual workshop aims at bringing together theoreticians and practitioners in order to chart out recent advances and discuss new directions in deep neural network-based approaches for solving inverse problems in the imaging sciences and beyond. NeurIPS, with its visibility and attendance by experts in machine learning, offers the ideal frame for this exchange of ideas. We will use this virtual format to make this topic accessible to a broader audience than the in-person meeting is able to as described below.