Carola Schönlieb (University of Cambridge), Gitta Kutyniok (TU Berlin)
The colloquium begins at 14:00 with a talk
by Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb (DAMTP Cambridge)
 Abstract:
 One of the most successful approaches to solve inverse problems in  imaging is to cast the problem as a variational model. The key to the  success of the variational approach is to define the variational energy  such that its minimiser reflects the structural properties of the  imaging problem in terms of regularisation and data consistency.
 Variational models constitute mathematically rigorous inversion models  with stability and approximation guarantees as well as a control on  qualitative and physical properties of the solution. On the negative  side, these methods are rigid in a sense that they can be adapted to  data only to a certain extent.
 Hence researchers started to apply machine learning techniques to  "learn" more expressible variational models. In this talk we discuss two  approaches: bilevel optimisation (which we investigated over the last  couple of years and which aims to find an optimal model by learning from  a set of desirable training examples) and quotient minimisation (which  we only recently proposed as a way to incorporate negative examples in  regularisation learning). Depending on time, we will review the analysis  of these approaches, their numerical treatment, and show applications  to learning sparse transforms, regularisation learning, learning of  noise models and of sampling patterns in MRI.
 This talk will potentially include joint work with S. Arridge, M.  Benning, L. Calatroni, C. Chung, J. C. De Los Reyes, M. Ehrhardt, G.  Gilboa, J. Grah, A. Hauptmann, S. Lunz, G. Maierhofer, O. Oektem, F.  Sherry, and T. Valkonen.
 At 15:00 there will be a coffee break followed by the second talk
 by Gitta Kutyniok  (TU Berlin)
Abstract:
 Despite the outstanding success of deep neural networks in real-world applications, most of the related research is empirically driven and a mathematical foundation is almost completely missing. One central task of a neural network is to approximate a function, which for instance encodes a classification task. In this talk, we will be concerned with the question, how well a function can be approximated by a neural network with sparse connectivity. Using methods from approximation theory and applied harmonic analysis, we will derive a fundamental lower bound on the sparsity of a neural network. By explicitly constructing neural networks based on certain representation systems, so-called shearlets, we will then demonstrate that this lower bound can in fact be attained.  Finally, we present numerical experiments, which surprisingly show that already the standard training algorithm generates deep neural networks obeying those optimal approximation rates.