Distributional Consistency Loss: Beyond Pointwise Data Terms in Inverse Problems

Recovering true signals from noisy measurements is a central challenge in inverse problems spanning medical imaging, geophysics, and signal processing. Current solutions nearly always balance prior assumptions regarding the true signal (regularization) with agreement to noisy measured data (data-fidelity). Conventional data-fidelity loss functions, such as mean-squared error (MSE) or negative log-likelihood, seek pointwise agreement with noisy measurements, often leading to overfitting to noise. In this work, we instead evaluate data-fidelity collectively by testing whether the observed measurements are statistically consistent with the noise distributions implied by the current estimate. We adopt this aggregated perspective and introduce $\textit{distributional consistency (DC) loss}$, a data-fidelity objective that replaces pointwise matching with distribution-level calibration. DC loss acts as a direct and practical plug-in replacement for standard data consistency terms: i) it is compatible with modern unsupervised regularizers that operate without paired measurement–ground-truth data, ii) it is optimized in the same way as traditional losses, and iii) it avoids overfitting to measurement noise without early stopping or the use of priors. Its scope naturally fits many practical inverse problems where the measurement-noise distribution is known and where the measured dataset consists of many independent noisy values. We demonstrate efficacy in two key example application areas: i) in image denoising with deep image prior, using DC instead of MSE loss removes the need for early stopping and achieves higher PSNR; ii) in medical image reconstruction from Poisson-noisy data, DC loss reduces artifacts in highly-iterated reconstructions and enhances the efficacy of hand-crafted regularization. These results position DC loss as a statistically grounded, performance-enhancing alternative to conventional fidelity losses for an important class of unsupervised noise-dominated inverse problems.