The widely used RED (Regularization-by-Denoising) framework uses pretrained denoisers as implicit regularizers for model-based reconstruction. Although RED generally yields high-fidelity reconstructions, the use of black-box denoisers can sometimes lead to instability. In this letter, we propose a data-driven mechanism to stabilize RED using the Koopman operator, a classical tool for analyzing dynamical systems. Specifically, we use the operator to capture the local dynamics of RED in a low-dimensional feature space, and its spectral radius is used to detect instability and formulate an adaptive step-size rule that is model-agnostic, has modest overhead, and requires no retraining. We test this with several pretrained denoisers to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Koopman stabilization.

Accepted to IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 2025