Local Inverse Geometry Can Be Amortized
About
Nonlinear inverse problems often trade inexpensive but fragile first-order updates against curvature-aware methods such as Gauss-Newton and Levenberg-Marquardt, which obtain stronger directions by repeatedly solving Jacobian-based linearized systems. We propose a learned alternative: amortize local inverse geometry into a reusable reverse operator. Our framework learns a bidirectional surrogate, Deceptron, and deploys it through D-IPG (Deceptron Inverse-Preconditioned Gradient), an iterative solver that pulls residual-corrected measurement-space proposals back to latent space. The key mechanism is a Jacobian Composition Penalty (JCP), which trains the reverse Jacobian to act as a local left inverse of the forward Jacobian; its runtime counterpart, RJCP, measures the same inverse-consistency error along optimization trajectories. We prove that D-IPG is first-order equivalent to damped Gauss-Newton under local pseudoinverse consistency, with deviation controlled by composition error and conditioning. Across seven PDE inverse-problem benchmarks, D-IPG outperforms standard baselines, achieves 94.8% mean success across the six-problem reliability suite, and reaches comparable or better recovery quality at up to 77x lower inference-time solve cost on the main benchmarks.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDE Inverse Problem | Advection-Diffusion-2D (full) | SR1 | 9 | |
| Inverse PDE Problem Solving | Allen-Cahn-2D | Success Rate100 | 6 | |
| Inverse PDE Problem Solving | Heat-3D | Success Rate1 | 5 | |
| PDE Inverse Problem | Heat-1D (full) | SR24.3 | 3 | |
| PDE Inverse Problem | Heat-2D (full) | SR100 | 3 | |
| PDE Inverse Problem | Heat-3D (full) | SR1 | 3 | |
| PDE Inverse Problem | Darcy-2D (full) | SR68.8 | 3 | |
| PDE Inverse Problem | Allen-Cahn-2D (full) | SR100 | 3 | |
| PDE Inverse Problem | Navier-Stokes-2D (full) | SR100 | 3 |