WARPd: A linearly convergent first-order method for inverse problems with approximate sharpness conditions

Abstract

Reconstruction of signals from undersampled and noisy measurements is a topic of considerable interest. Sharpness conditions directly control the recovery performance of restart schemes for first-order methods without the need for restrictive assumptions such as strong convexity. However, they are challenging to apply in the presence of noise or approximate model classes (e.g., approximate sparsity). We provide a first-order method: Weighted, Accelerated and Restarted Primal-dual (WARPd), based on primal-dual iterations and a novel restart-reweight scheme. Under a generic approximate sharpness condition, WARPd achieves stable linear convergence to the desired vector. Many problems of interest fit into this framework. For example, we analyze sparse recovery in compressed sensing, low-rank matrix recovery, matrix completion, TV regularization, minimization of $\|Bx\|_{l^1}$ under constraints ($l^1$-analysis problems for general $B$), and mixed regularization problems. We show how several quantities controlling recovery performance also provide explicit approximate sharpness constants. Numerical experiments show that WARPd compares favorably with specialized state-of-the-art methods and is ideally suited for solving large-scale problems. We also present a noise-blind variant based on the Square-Root LASSO decoder. Finally, we show how to unroll WARPd as neural networks. This approximation theory result provides lower bounds for stable and accurate neural networks for inverse problems and sheds light on architecture choices. Code and a gallery of examples are made available online as a MATLAB package.