Solving Bilinear Inverse Problems using Deep Generative Priors

This paper proposes a new framework to handle the bilinear inverse problems (BIPs): recover $\boldsymbol{w}$, and $\boldsymbol{x}$ from the measurements of the form $\boldsymbol{y} = \mathcal{A}(\boldsymbol{w},\boldsymbol{x})$, where $\mathcal{A}$ is a bilinear operator. The recovery problem of the unknowns $\boldsymbol{w}$, and $\boldsymbol{x}$ can be formulated as a non-convex program. A general strategy is proposed to turn the ill-posed BIP to a relatively well-conditioned BIP by imposing a structural assumption that $\boldsymbol{w}$, and $\boldsymbol{x}$ are members of some classes $\mathcal{W}$, and $\mathcal{X}$, respectively, that are parameterized by unknown latent low-dimensional features. We learn functions mapping from the hidden feature space to the ambient space for each class using generative models. The resulting reduced search space of the solution enables a simple alternating gradient descent scheme to yield promising result in solving the non-convex BIP. To demonstrate the performance of our algorithm, we choose an important BIP; namely, blind image deblurring as a motivating application. We show through extensive experiments that this technique shows promising results in deblurring images of real datasets and is also robust to noise perturbations.