Stochastic asymptotical regularization for nonlinear ill-posed problems

Abstract Recently, the stochastic asymptotical regularization (SAR) has been developed in Zhang and Chen (2023 Inverse Problems 39 015007) for the uncertainty quantification of the stable approximate solution of linear ill-posed inverse problems. In this paper, we extend the regularization theory of SAR for nonlinear inverse problems. By combining techniques from classical regularization theory and stochastic analysis, we prove the regularizing properties of SAR with regard to mean-square convergence. The convergence rate results under the canonical sourcewise condition are also studied. Several numerical examples are used to show the accuracy and advantages of SAR: compared with the conventional deterministic regularization approaches for deterministic inverse problems, SAR can quantify the uncertainty in error estimates for ill-posed problems, improve accuracy by selecting the optimal path, escape local minima for nonlinear problems, and identify multiple solutions by clustering samples of obtained approximate solutions.