A front data assimilation system named FIREFLY has been developed at CERFACS in collaboration with the University of Maryland to better estimate the environmental conditions (biomass properties, near-surface wind). We discuss the sequential application of the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) in FIREFLY for correcting in a spatially-distributed way, input parameters in order to better track the fire front position. In particular, using a polynomial chaos surrogate to mimic the wildfire spread model in the EnKF algorithm was found in collaboration with LIMSI to be a promising strategy to reduce the computational cost of FIREFLY.
We also discuss the way we represent the distance between simulated and observed fronts. In the CEMRACS project, a new discrepancy operator will be introduced to better represent the match (or mismatch) between simulated fronts and mid-infrared observations in collaboration with INRIA. This front level-set data assimilation derived from image processing and designed for electrophysiology will be extended to wildfire spread monitoring.[-]

The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is an optimization tool of choice for several imaging inverse problems, namely due its flexibility, modularity, and efficiency. In this talk, I will begin by reviewing our earlier work on using ADMM to deal with classical problems such as deconvolution, inpainting, compressive imaging, and how we have exploited its flexibility to deal with different noise models, including Gaussian, Poissonian, and multiplicative, and with several types of regularizers (TV, frame-based analysis, synthesis, or combinations thereof). I will then describe more recent work on using ADMM for other problems, namely blind deconvolution and image segmentation, as well as very recent work where ADMM is used with plug-in learned denoisers to achieve state-of-the-art results in class-specific image deconvolution. Finally, on the theoretical front, I will describe very recent work on tackling the infamous problem of how to adjust the penalty parameter of ADMM.[-]

Recently, an important research activity on mean field games (MFGs for short) has been initiated by the pioneering works of Lasry and Lions: it aims at studying the asymptotic behavior of stochastic differential games (Nash equilibria) as the number $n$ of agents tends to infinity. The field is now rapidly growing in several directions, including stochastic optimal control, analysis of PDEs, calculus of variations, numerical analysis and computing, and the potential applications to economics and social sciences are numerous.
In the limit when $n \to +\infty$, a given agent feels the presence of the others through the statistical distribution of the states. Assuming that the perturbations of a single agent's strategy does not influence the statistical states distribution, the latter acts as a parameter in the control problem to be solved by each agent. When the dynamics of the agents are independent stochastic processes, MFGs naturally lead to a coupled system of two partial differential equations (PDEs for short), a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.
The latter system of PDEs has closed form solutions in very few cases only. Therefore, numerical simulation are crucial in order to address applications. The present mini-course will be devoted to numerical methods that can be used to approximate the systems of PDEs.
The numerical schemes that will be presented rely basically on monotone approximations of the Hamiltonian and on a suitable weak formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation.
These schemes have several important features:

- The discrete problem has the same structure as the continous one, so existence, energy estimates, and possibly uniqueness can be obtained with the same kind of arguments

- Monotonicity guarantees the stability of the scheme: it is robust in the deterministic limit

- convergence to classical or weak solutions can be proved

Finally, there are particular cases named variational MFGS in which the system of PDEs can be seen as the optimality conditions of some optimal control problem driven by a PDE. In such cases, augmented Lagrangian methods can be used for solving the discrete nonlinear system. The mini-course will be orgamized as follows

1. Introduction to the system of PDEs and its interpretation. Uniqueness of classical solutions.

2. Monotone finite difference schemes

3. Examples of applications

4. Variational MFG and related algorithms for solving the discrete system of nonlinear equations[-]

Recently, an important research activity on mean field games (MFGs for short) has been initiated by the pioneering works of Lasry and Lions: it aims at studying the asymptotic behavior of stochastic differential games (Nash equilibria) as the number $n$ of agents tends to infinity. The field is now rapidly growing in several directions, including stochastic optimal control, analysis of PDEs, calculus of variations, numerical analysis and computing, and the potential applications to economics and social sciences are numerous.
In the limit when $n \to +\infty$, a given agent feels the presence of the others through the statistical distribution of the states. Assuming that the perturbations of a single agent's strategy does not influence the statistical states distribution, the latter acts as a parameter in the control problem to be solved by each agent. When the dynamics of the agents are independent stochastic processes, MFGs naturally lead to a coupled system of two partial differential equations (PDEs for short), a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.
The latter system of PDEs has closed form solutions in very few cases only. Therefore, numerical simulation are crucial in order to address applications. The present mini-course will be devoted to numerical methods that can be used to approximate the systems of PDEs.
The numerical schemes that will be presented rely basically on monotone approximations of the Hamiltonian and on a suitable weak formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation.
These schemes have several important features:

- The discrete problem has the same structure as the continous one, so existence, energy estimates, and possibly uniqueness can be obtained with the same kind of arguments

- Monotonicity guarantees the stability of the scheme: it is robust in the deterministic limit

- convergence to classical or weak solutions can be proved

Finally, there are particular cases named variational MFGS in which the system of PDEs can be seen as the optimality conditions of some optimal control problem driven by a PDE. In such cases, augmented Lagrangian methods can be used for solving the discrete nonlinear system. The mini-course will be orgamized as follows

1. Introduction to the system of PDEs and its interpretation. Uniqueness of classical solutions.

2. Monotone finite difference schemes

3. Examples of applications

4. Variational MFG and related algorithms for solving the discrete system of nonlinear equations[-]

Recently, an important research activity on mean field games (MFGs for short) has been initiated by the pioneering works of Lasry and Lions: it aims at studying the asymptotic behavior of stochastic differential games (Nash equilibria) as the number $n$ of agents tends to infinity. The field is now rapidly growing in several directions, including stochastic optimal control, analysis of PDEs, calculus of variations, numerical analysis and computing, and the potential applications to economics and social sciences are numerous.
In the limit when $n \to +\infty$, a given agent feels the presence of the others through the statistical distribution of the states. Assuming that the perturbations of a single agent's strategy does not influence the statistical states distribution, the latter acts as a parameter in the control problem to be solved by each agent. When the dynamics of the agents are independent stochastic processes, MFGs naturally lead to a coupled system of two partial differential equations (PDEs for short), a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.
The latter system of PDEs has closed form solutions in very few cases only. Therefore, numerical simulation are crucial in order to address applications. The present mini-course will be devoted to numerical methods that can be used to approximate the systems of PDEs.
The numerical schemes that will be presented rely basically on monotone approximations of the Hamiltonian and on a suitable weak formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation.
These schemes have several important features:

- The discrete problem has the same structure as the continous one, so existence, energy estimates, and possibly uniqueness can be obtained with the same kind of arguments

- Monotonicity guarantees the stability of the scheme: it is robust in the deterministic limit

- convergence to classical or weak solutions can be proved

Finally, there are particular cases named variational MFGS in which the system of PDEs can be seen as the optimality conditions of some optimal control problem driven by a PDE. In such cases, augmented Lagrangian methods can be used for solving the discrete nonlinear system. The mini-course will be orgamized as follows

1. Introduction to the system of PDEs and its interpretation. Uniqueness of classical solutions.

2. Monotone finite difference schemes

3. Examples of applications

4. Variational MFG and related algorithms for solving the discrete system of nonlinear equations[-]

The theory of mean field type control (or control of MacKean-Vlasov) aims at describing the behaviour of a large number of agents using a common feedback control and interacting through some mean field term. The solution to this type of control problem can be seen as a collaborative optimum. We will present the system of partial differential equations (PDE) arising in this setting: a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. They describe respectively the evolution of the distribution of the agents' states and the evolution of the value function. Since it comes from a control problem, this PDE system differs in general from the one arising in mean field games.
Recently, this kind of model has been applied to crowd dynamics. More precisely, in this talk we will be interested in modeling congestion effects: the agents move but try to avoid very crowded regions. One way to take into account such effects is to let the cost of displacement increase in the regions where the density of agents is large. The cost may depend on the density in a non-local or in a local way. We will present one class of models for each case and study the associated PDE systems. The first one has classical solutions whereas the second one has weak solutions. Numerical results based on the Newton algorithm and the Augmented Lagrangian method will be presented.
This is joint work with Yves Achdou.[-]

Can modern signal processing be used to overcome the diffraction limit? The classical diffraction limit states that the resolution of a linear imaging system is fundamentally limited by one half of the wavelength of light. This implies that conventional light microscopes cannot distinguish two objects placed within a distance closer than 0.5 × 400 = 200nm (blue) or 0.5 × 700 = 350nm (red). This significantly impedes biomedical discovery by restricting our ability to observe biological structure and processes smaller than 100nm. Recent progress in sparsity-driven signal processing has created a powerful paradigm for increasing both the resolution and overall quality of imaging by promoting model-based image acquisition and reconstruction. This has led to multiple influential results demonstrating super-resolution in practical imaging systems. To date, however, the vast majority of work in signal processing has neglected the fundamental nonlinearity of the object-light interaction and its potential to lead to resolution enhancement. As a result, modern theory heavily focuses on linear measurement models that are truly effective only when object-light interactions are weak. Without a solid signal processing foundation for understanding such nonlinear interactions, we undervalue their impact on information transfer in the image formation. This ultimately limits our capability to image a large class of objects, such as biological tissue, that generally are in large-volumes and interact strongly and nonlinearly with light.
The goal of this talk is to present the recent progress in model-based imaging under multiple scattering. We will discuss several key applications including optical diffraction tomography, Fourier Ptychography, and large-scale Holographic microscopy. We will show that all these application can benefit from models, such as the Rytov approximation and beam propagation method, that take light scattering into account. We will discuss the integration of such models into the state-of-the-art optimization algorithms such as FISTA and ADMM. Finally, we will describe the most recent work that uses learned-priors for improving the quality of image reconstruction under multiple scattering.[-]

Neural networks trained to minimize the logistic (a.k.a. cross-entropy) loss with gradient-based methods are observed to perform well in many supervised classification tasks. Towards understanding this phenomenon, we analyze the training and generalization behavior of infinitely wide two-layer neural networks with homogeneous activations. We show that the limits of the gradient flow on exponentially tailed losses can be fully characterized as a max-margin classifier in a certain non-Hilbertian space of functions.[-]

We are interested in nonsmooth analysis of backpropagation as implemented in modern machine learning librairies, such as Tensorflow or Pytorch. First I will illustrate how blind application of
differential calculus to nonsmooth objects can be problematic, requiring a proper mathematical model.
Then I will introduce a weak notion of generalized derivative, named conservativity, and illustrate how it complies with calculus and optimization for well structured objects. We provide stability results for empirical risk minimization similar as in the smooth setting for the combination of nonsmooth automatic differentiation, minibatch stochastic approximation and first order optimization. This is joint work with Jérôme Bolte.[-]