In this work, we provide an e fficient and realistic data-driven approach to simulate astronomical images using deep generative models from machine learning. Our solution is based on a variant of the generative adversarial network (GAN) with progressive training methodology and Wasserstein cost function. The proposed solution generates naturalistic images of galaxies that show complex structures and high diversity, which suggests that data-driven simulations using machine learning can replace many of the expensive model-driven methods used in astronomical data processing.

In this work, we formulate the fixed-length distribution matching as a Bayesian inference problem. Our proposed solution is inspired from the compressed sensing paradigm and the sparse superposition (SS) codes. First, we introduce sparsity in the binary source via position modulation (PM). We then present a simple and exact matcher based on Gaussian signal quantization. At the receiver, the dematcher exploits the sparsity in the source and performs low-complexity dematching based on generalized approximate message-passing (GAMP). We show that GAMP dematcher and spatial coupling lead to asymptotically optimal performance, in the sense that the rate tends to the entropy of the target distribution with vanishing reconstruction error in a proper limit. Furthermore, we assess the performance of the dematcher on practical Hadamard-based operators. A remarkable feature of our proposed solution is the possibility to: i) perform matching at the symbol level (nonbinary); ii) perform joint channel coding and matching.

Factorizing low-rank matrices has many applications in machine learning and statistics. For probabilistic models in the Bayes optimal setting, a general expression for the mutual information has been proposed using heuristic statistical physics computations, and proven in few specific cases. Here, we show how to rigorously prove the conjectured formula for the symmetric rank-one case. This allows to express the minimal mean-square-error and to characterize the detectability phase transitions in a large set of estimation problems ranging from community detection to sparse PCA. We also show that for a large set of parameters, an iterative algorithm called approximate message-passing is Bayes optimal. There exists, however, a gap between what currently known polynomial algorithms can do and what is expected information theoretically. Additionally, the proof technique has an interest of its own and exploits three essential ingredients: the interpolation method introduced in statistical physics by Guerra, the analysis of the approximate message-passing algorithm and the theory of spatial coupling and threshold saturation in coding. Our approach is generic and applicable to other open problems in statistical estimation where heuristic statistical physics predictions are available.