Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M Learning imaging systems and solving inverse problems from unpaired data

Inria; Montbonnot-Saint-Martin; On-site; EUR 42,000 - 54,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Partial transport reimbursement

Teleworking 90 days/year

Leave: 7 weeks + RTT + exceptional-lea

Social, cultural and sports events

Vocational training

Job summary

Inria, au Centre Inria de l’Université Grenoble Alpes, recherche un/une post-doctorant(e) pour des travaux sur l’imagerie et les problèmes inverses à partir de données non appariées, au sein de l’équipe Thoth sous la supervision de Julien Mairal.

Le poste s’inscrit dans un contexte européen et collaboratif avec le LJK et d’autres partenaires, et vise à développer des modèles génératifs et des solveurs plug-and-play.

Qualifications

• Docteur en machine learning, vision par ordinateur, traitement d’image, mathématiques appliquées ou domaine connexe.
• Bonnes publications et solides bases en mathématiques (optimisation, probabilité, statistiques).
• Expérience en problèmes inverses et modèles génératifs appréciée.

Responsibilities

• Conduire des recherches de haut niveau menant à des publications dans des conférences/ journaux de ML et CV.
• Participer à l’élaboration de méthodes d’apprentissage d’imagerie à partir de données non appariées.
• Interagir avec les doctorants et co-encadrer des projets du groupe Thoth.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Publications

Mathematics (optimization, probability

Education

PhD in machine learning / computer vision / signal or image processing / applied mathematics

Tools

PyTorch

Python

Job description

Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M Learning imaging systems and solving inverse problems from unpaired data

Fonction : Post-Doctorant

Staff is present on three campuses in Grenoble, in close collaboration with other research and higher education institutions (Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, CEA, INRAE, …), but also with key economic players in the area.

The Centre Inria de l’Université Grenoble Alpes is active in the fields of high-performance computing, verification and embedded systems, modeling of the environment at multiple levels, and data science and artificial intelligence. The center is a top-level scientific institute with an extensive network of international collaborations in Europe and the rest of the world.

The post-doctoral researcher will be part of the Thoth team, which is specialized in computer vision and machine learning, and will be supervised by Julien Mairal. Thoth is one of the most recognized European research teams in machine learning and computer vision, is part of the Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann at Université Grenoble Alpes, participates in several European projects (including ERCs), and has many international academic and industrial collaborations. The post-doc will join an active group of PhD students and post-docs working on generative modeling, optimization and inverse problems.

Location: The post-doc will work at the Inria centre at Université Grenoble Alpes. Grenoble
is a lively city which hosts many foreign students and researchers. Located in the heart of the
French Alps, its direct surroundings offer great outdoor recreation including skiing, cycling, and
hiking. Grenoble is well-connected to Lyon and Geneva airports, and Paris can be reached from
Grenoble in 3h by train.

The post-doc is expected to conduct high-quality research leading to publications in top-tier
venues in machine learning, computer vision or signal processing, and will also have the oppor-
tunity to interact with and co-supervise PhD students of the team.

Research Context: Inverse problems are ubiquitous in scientific and engineering domains
that involve image acquisition, from computational photography to microscopy, astrophysics
and medical imaging. The quantity of interest is observed through a forward process (blur,
noise, subsampling, sensor effects) and must be recovered from these degraded measurements.
Modern solvers, such as plug-and-play algorithms or methods based on diffusion and flow-
based generative models, combine a model of the acquisition process with a powerful learned
prior on clean signals, and achieve impressive results when the forward operator is known.
In practice, however, the forward operator is rarely known precisely. Calibrating a real imaging
system typically requires dedicated hardware or pairs of clean and degraded images, which are
expensive or even impossible to acquire, for instance for a real camera lens. A recent line of work
in the Thoth team has shown that the forward operator can instead be learned from unpaired
data, by matching distributions both on the measurement side and on the reconstruction side,
through a differentiable plug-and-play solver parameterized by the operator being learned. This
opens the door to imaging systems that calibrate themselves from data, and to reconstruction
methods that remain accurate on real-world acquisitions.

Objectives: The goal of the post-doc is to develop principled and scalable methods for learning imaging systems and solving inverse problems when supervision is scarce or unavailable. The research directions are deliberately open and will be shaped together with the candidate according to their interests and expertise. They include, for instance:

• extending unpaired operator learning to richer forward models (spatially varying, nonlinear, or with unknown noise statistics) and to new acquisition modalities;
• jointly learning the forward operator and the reconstruction method, possibly leveraging modern generative models (diffusion models, flow matching) as priors;
• understanding the theoretical aspects of the problem, such as identifiability of the operator from unpaired data and the interplay between calibration and reconstruction quality;
• designing models that can be trained across many devices or degradations and adapt quickly to new ones;
• applying these methods to real-world imaging problems, in computational photography or in scientific imaging.

Desired Skills: The candidate should hold a PhD in machine learning, computer vision, signal or image processing, applied mathematics, or a related field, and have a strong publication record. A good background in mathematics (optimization, probability, statistics) and strong programming skills in Python and PyTorch are expected. Prior experience with inverse problems, generative models or optimal transport will be appreciated.

Avantages

• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking (90 days / year) and flexible organization of working hours
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage under conditions