Data-Driven Reconstruction of Gravitationally Lensed Galaxies using Recurrent Inference Machines

Understand

We present a machine learning method for the reconstruction of the undistorted images of background sources in strongly lensed systems.

• This method treats the source as a pixelated image and utilizes the Recurrent Inference Machine (RIM) to iteratively reconstruct the background source given a lens model.
• Our architecture learns to minimize the likelihood of the model parameters (source pixels) given the data using the physical forward model (ray tracing simulations) while implicitly learning the prior of the source structure from the training data.
• This results in better performance compared to linear inversion methods, where the prior information is limited to the 2-point covariance of the source pixels approximated with a Gaussian form, and often specified in a relatively arbitrary manner.