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Updated: Oct 3, 2026

Uncovering Hidden Dynamics of Natural Photonic Structures Using Holographic Imaging
Published on: March 31, 2022
Discovery of unobservable parameters via physical embedding
Le Cheng1, Xiaoran Liu1, Lingjin Kong1
1College of Electronic Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China.
Abstract:
Recovering a source signal from indirect measurements often depends on parameters that cannot be observed directly, such as wireless channel states or MRI coil sensitivities. We introduce Physics-Embedded Inverse Learning (PEIL), which embeds a fixed, differentiable inverse solver and uses signal recovery to supervise their estimation without parameter labels. PEIL makes parameter selection task-optimal: each setting is judged by the reconstruction it produces through the fixed solver, rather than by its agreement with nominal labels. In locally non-identifiable regimes, different settings yield nearly equivalent reconstructions, allowing the loss to favour those better suited to the fixed solver. Non-identifiability thus becomes a resource for recovery. In high-mobility wireless communications, PEIL generalises to unseen channel profiles and velocities without retraining and reaches comparable recovery performance using 20-fold fewer training samples than baselines trained with parameter labels. At high SNR, it also achieves a lower symbol error rate than an oracle-reference least-squares baseline using true pilot-channel values and fixed interpolation. In parallel MRI, without sensitivity-map labels or a separate calibration step, PEIL discovers stable coil sensitivity maps with magnitude structure consistent with a calibration reference and reconstructs anatomically faithful images. Together, these results show that a fixed inverse solver can make unobservable parameters learnable from signal recovery.
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