An Ultra-Fast MLE for Low SNR Multi-Reference Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kreymer, Shay, Balanov, Amnon, Bendory, Tamir
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Kreymer, Shay
Balanov, Amnon
Bendory, Tamir
author_facet Kreymer, Shay
Balanov, Amnon
Bendory, Tamir
contents Motivated by single-particle cryo-electron microscopy, multi-reference alignment (MRA) models the task of recovering an unknown signal from multiple noisy observations corrupted by random rotations. The standard approach, expectation-maximization (EM), often becomes computationally prohibitive, particularly in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) settings. We introduce an alternative, ultra-fast algorithm for MRA over the special orthogonal group $\mathrm{SO}(2)$. By performing a Taylor expansion of the log-likelihood in the low-SNR regime, we estimate the signal by sequentially computing data-driven averages of observations. Our method requires only one pass over the data, dramatically reducing computational cost compared to EM. Numerical experiments show that the proposed approach achieves high accuracy in low-SNR environments and provides an excellent initialization for subsequent EM refinement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_04831
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Ultra-Fast MLE for Low SNR Multi-Reference Alignment
Kreymer, Shay
Balanov, Amnon
Bendory, Tamir
Signal Processing
Motivated by single-particle cryo-electron microscopy, multi-reference alignment (MRA) models the task of recovering an unknown signal from multiple noisy observations corrupted by random rotations. The standard approach, expectation-maximization (EM), often becomes computationally prohibitive, particularly in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) settings. We introduce an alternative, ultra-fast algorithm for MRA over the special orthogonal group $\mathrm{SO}(2)$. By performing a Taylor expansion of the log-likelihood in the low-SNR regime, we estimate the signal by sequentially computing data-driven averages of observations. Our method requires only one pass over the data, dramatically reducing computational cost compared to EM. Numerical experiments show that the proposed approach achieves high accuracy in low-SNR environments and provides an excellent initialization for subsequent EM refinement.
title An Ultra-Fast MLE for Low SNR Multi-Reference Alignment
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04831