Self-supervised learning from noisy and incomplete data

Many important problems in science and engineering boil down to inferring a signal from noisy and/or incomplete observations, where the observation process is known. Historically, this problem has been tackled using some sort of hand-crafted regularization (sparsity, total variation) to obtain meaningful estimates. Recent data-driven methods often offer better solutions by directly learning a solver from examples of ground-truth signals and associated observations. However, in many real-world applications, ground-truth signals for training are very expensive or even impossible to obtain. Self-supervised learning methods offer a promising alternative by learning a solver from measurement data alone, bypassing the need for ground-truth references. This manuscript provides a comprehensive summary of different self-supervised methods for inverse problems, with a special emphasis on their theoretical underpinnings and presents practical applications in imaging inverse problems.

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Publication Details

Journal
Foundations and Trends® in Signal Processing
Published
2026-04-15
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1108/ftsig-10-2025-0133
Primary Topic
Numerical methods in inverse problems
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Self-supervised learning from noisy and incomplete data

Mike Davies, Julián Tachella
Foundations and Trends® in Signal Processing
Numerical methods in inverse problems
article

Self-supervised learning from noisy and incomplete data

Mike Davies, Julián Tachella
article en

Abstract

Many important problems in science and engineering boil down to inferring a signal from noisy and/or incomplete observations, where the observation process is known. Historically, this problem has been tackled using some sort of hand-crafted regularization (sparsity, total variation) to obtain meaningful estimates. Recent data-driven methods often offer better solutions by directly learning a solver from examples of ground-truth signals and associated observations. However, in many real-world applications, ground-truth signals for training are very expensive or even impossible to obtain. Self-supervised learning methods offer a promising alternative by learning a solver from measurement data alone, bypassing the need for ground-truth references. This manuscript provides a comprehensive summary of different self-supervised methods for inverse problems, with a special emphasis on their theoretical underpinnings and presents practical applications in imaging inverse problems.

Foundations and Trends® in Signal ProcessingVol. 20(2)
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (FR), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR), Laboratoire de Physique de l'ENS de Lyon (FR), University of Edinburgh (GB)
Openalex Percentile: Top 2%
Numerical methods in inverse problems
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