Deep greedy unfolding: Sorting out argsorting in greedy sparse recovery algorithms

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mohammad-Taheri, Sina, Colbrook, Matthew J., Brugiapaglia, Simone
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915296468533248
author Mohammad-Taheri, Sina
Colbrook, Matthew J.
Brugiapaglia, Simone
author_facet Mohammad-Taheri, Sina
Colbrook, Matthew J.
Brugiapaglia, Simone
contents Gradient-based learning imposes (deep) neural networks to be differentiable at all steps. This includes model-based architectures constructed by unrolling iterations of an iterative algorithm onto layers of a neural network, known as algorithm unrolling. However, greedy sparse recovery algorithms depend on the non-differentiable argsort operator, which hinders their integration into neural networks. In this paper, we address this challenge in Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) and Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT), two popular representative algorithms in this class. We propose permutation-based variants of these algorithms and approximate permutation matrices using "soft" permutation matrices derived from softsort, a continuous relaxation of argsort. We demonstrate -- both theoretically and numerically -- that Soft-OMP and Soft-IHT, as differentiable counterparts of OMP and IHT and fully compatible with neural network training, effectively approximate these algorithms with a controllable degree of accuracy. This leads to the development of OMP- and IHT-Net, fully trainable network architectures based on Soft-OMP and Soft-IHT, respectively. Finally, by choosing weights as "structure-aware" trainable parameters, we connect our approach to structured sparse recovery and demonstrate its ability to extract latent sparsity patterns from data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_15661
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep greedy unfolding: Sorting out argsorting in greedy sparse recovery algorithms
Mohammad-Taheri, Sina
Colbrook, Matthew J.
Brugiapaglia, Simone
Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Gradient-based learning imposes (deep) neural networks to be differentiable at all steps. This includes model-based architectures constructed by unrolling iterations of an iterative algorithm onto layers of a neural network, known as algorithm unrolling. However, greedy sparse recovery algorithms depend on the non-differentiable argsort operator, which hinders their integration into neural networks. In this paper, we address this challenge in Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) and Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT), two popular representative algorithms in this class. We propose permutation-based variants of these algorithms and approximate permutation matrices using "soft" permutation matrices derived from softsort, a continuous relaxation of argsort. We demonstrate -- both theoretically and numerically -- that Soft-OMP and Soft-IHT, as differentiable counterparts of OMP and IHT and fully compatible with neural network training, effectively approximate these algorithms with a controllable degree of accuracy. This leads to the development of OMP- and IHT-Net, fully trainable network architectures based on Soft-OMP and Soft-IHT, respectively. Finally, by choosing weights as "structure-aware" trainable parameters, we connect our approach to structured sparse recovery and demonstrate its ability to extract latent sparsity patterns from data.
title Deep greedy unfolding: Sorting out argsorting in greedy sparse recovery algorithms
topic Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15661