On Non-Uniqueness of the Student’s t-formulation for Linear Inverse Problems
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We review the statistical interpretation of inverse problem formulations, and the motivations for selecting non-convex penalties for robust behaviour with respect to measurement outliers or artifacts in the data. An important downside of using non-convex formulations such as the Student’s t is the potential for non-uniqueness, and we present a simple example where the Student’s t penalty can be made to have many local minima by appropriately selecting the degrees of freedom parameter. On the other hand, the non-convexity of the Student’s t is precisely what gives it the ability to ignore artifacts in the data. We explain this idea, and present a stylized imaging experiment, where the Student’s t is able to recover a velocity perturbation from data contaminated by a very peculiar artifact — data from a different velocity perturbation. The performance of Student’s t inversion is investigated empirically for different values of the degrees of freedom parameter, and different initial conditions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it