Data-driven Morozov regularization of inverse problems

The solution of inverse problems is crucial in various fields such as medicine, biology, and engineering, where one seeks to find a solution from noisy observations. These problems often exhibit non-uniqueness and ill-posedness, resulting in instability under noise with standard methods. To address this, regularization techniques have been developed to balance data fitting and prior information. Recently, data-driven variational regularization methods have emerged, mainly analyzed within the framework of Tikhonov regularization, termed Network Tikhonov (NETT). This paper introduces Morozov regularization combined with a learned regularizer, termed DD-Morozov regularization. Our approach employs neural networks to define non-convex regularizers tailored to training data, enabling a convergence analysis in the non-convex context with noise-dependent regularizers. We also propose a refined training strategy that improves adaptation to ill-posed problems compared to NETT's original strategy, which primarily focuses on addressing non-uniqueness. We present numerical results in the context of attenuation correction in photoacoustic tomography, comparing DD-Morozov regularization with NETT using the same trained regularizer, both with and without an additional total variation regularizer.