SPS Webinar: Plug & Play Priors and Multi-agent Consensus Equilibrium for Scientific Applications
Date: 16 May 2024
Time: 9:00 AM ET (New York Time)
Presenter(s): Dr. Suhas Sreehari
Original article: Download article
The original article will be made publicly available for download on the day of the webinar for 48 hours.
Abstract
In this talk, we present an outline of a powerful Bayesian estimation framework we call "Plug-and-Play Priors" (PnP). We invented this family of algorithms (including "consensus equilibrium") to solve large-scale ill-posed inverse problems, particularly focusing on computational imaging applications. At its core, PnP is powerful because it allows for off-the-shelf denoisers and other ML models and filters to be used as Bayesian prior models. In our original work, we built out PnP on top of alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), but several researchers have since adapted our methods to other frameworks such as FISTA. We also present theoretical conditions on these off-the-shelf models and filters (used as priors) to ensure PnP iterates converge. Through these theoretical guarantees, Plug-and-Play has indeed come a long way from what could very well have been "Plug-and-Pray". We will also talk about several imaging examples that demonstrate what PnP has been able to achieve, and why it has spawned a new sub-area of computational imaging. We end the talk with mentions of some surprising-and-impressive applications and extensions other researchers have achieved, as they have built on top of our original PnP algorithm.
Biography
Suhas Sreehari (M'12, SM'22) received the B.E. degree in telecommunications engineering from V.T.U., India, in 2010, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Windsor, Canada, in 2012, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 2017.
He is currently a Research Scientist in machine learning and computational imaging at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN since 2021. From 2017 to 2021, he was Assistant Vice President of quantitative analytics at Wells Fargo, San Francisco.
Dr. Sreehari is the recipient of the 2020 SIAM Imaging Sciences Best Paper Prize and the 2018 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award.
