Analyzing Inverse Problems with Invertible Neural Networks

Abstract

For many applications, in particular in natural science, the task is to determine hidden system parameters from a set of measurements. Often, the forward process from parameter- to measurement-space is well-defined, whereas the inverse problem is ambiguous: multiple parameter sets can result in the same measurement. To fully characterize this ambiguity, the full posterior parameter distribution, conditioned on an observed measurement, has to be determined. We argue that a particular class of neural networks is well suited for this task – so-called Invertible Neural Networks (INNs). Unlike classical neural networks, which attempt to solve the ambiguous inverse problem directly, INNs focus on learning the forward process, using additional latent output variables to capture the information otherwise lost. Due to invertibility, a model of the corresponding inverse process is learned implicitly. Given a specific measurement and the distribution of the latent variables, the inverse pass of the INN provides the full posterior over parameter space. We prove theoretically and verify experimentally, on artificial data and real-world problems from medicine and astrophysics, that INNs are a powerful analysis tool to find multi-modalities in parameter space, uncover parameter correlations, and identify unrecoverable parameters.