ShuffleFlow: Scalable Posterior Inference for Bayesian Inverse Imaging

Flow matching approaches to imaging inverse problems commonly incorporate measurements in two ways. Conditioning-based approaches supply measurement-derived information as a network input, often through concatenation, while inference-guided approaches combine an unconditional velocity field with a separate data-consistency update. In these common formulations, the forward model is not explicitly enforced within the learned conditional velocity field. We propose a principled parametrization of the measurement-conditional velocity field to solve inverse problems. Under linear interpolation, we express the conditional velocity $v(x_t,t,y)$ in terms of the posterior mean $E[x_1 | x_t,y]$, and characterize that mean as the unique minimizer of a variational objective whose data-consistency term is explicit. We further prove that the velocity field defines a probability flow from the source distribution to the measurement-conditioned posterior. Splitting the variational objective yields a conditional velocity parameterization with operator-dependent data-consistency updates, which we train end-to-end under the flow-matching objective, with no additional guidance at inference. Our method achieves state-of-the-art PSNR with $50\times$ fewer function evaluations than the strongest flow baseline. Varying the sampling steps provides test-time control over the distortion-perception trade-off without retraining.

Flow matching has emerged as the state-of-the-art generative model and has been used for plug-and-play (PnP) priors to solve inverse problems in computational imaging. However, existing flow-based inverse solvers assume linear forward models and/or make simplifying approximations in posterior sampling. To circumvent these problems, we introduce FlowSGS, a flow-based posterior sampling method using Split Gibbs Sampling (SGS) to decompose the posterior into a likelihood step and a prior step. Specifically, we sample from the likelihood step using Langevin dynamics and leverage the Stochastic Interpolants (SI) framework to integrate a pretrained flow model into the prior step. We provide a form for the prior step that uses SI's reverse-time SDE, and show connections to previous PnP methods. Moreover, with the aid of the flow prior's straight probability paths and a novel timestep correction technique for the reverse-time SDE, FlowSGS requires fewer network evaluations in its prior step than plug-and-play diffusion samplers. Our experiments show state-of-the-art performance on a range of inverse problems. For the first time, we provide an experiment on a nonlinear inverse problem (Fourier phase retrieval) for flow-based inverse solvers.

A growing family of training-free solvers -- FlowDPS, FLOWER, PnP-Flow and their diffusion ancestors (DPS, DAPS) -- repurpose a pretrained flow-matching prior to solve imaging inverse problems by adding a measurement-guidance term to the deterministic probability-flow ODE. Despite strong empirical results, what these per-step corrections actually approximate -- and how far the resulting samples are from the true posterior $p(x\mid y)$ -- has not been characterized. We give a posterior-transport account of flow-based inverse problem solving. Our starting point is a simple but consequential fact: for a \emph{deterministic} flow prior, Bayesian conditioning is realized entirely by a \emph{reweighting of the source distribution}, not by a drift correction; pushing the reweighted source through the \emph{unmodified} velocity field yields exact posterior samples. From this we show that trajectory-guidance solvers can be read as the minimum-kinetic-energy \emph{correction} field needed to morph the unconditional source into the posterior, and that FlowDPS / FLOWER / PnP-Flow correspond to distinct zeroth-order / Gaussian / proximal approximations of this single object; we bound the resulting posterior bias in Wasserstein distance. A controlled $2$D study with a closed-form posterior confirms the theory decisively: source reweighting matches the true posterior to the Monte-Carlo floor on every metric, whereas trajectory guidance incurs $200$--$800\times$ larger error and collapses posterior modes, \emph{regardless of guidance strength}. Guided by the analysis we propose a cheap, principled velocity-correction solver that is competitive across two in-domain priors (AFHQ, CelebA) and two out-of-distribution settings while, unlike point-estimate source-space optimizers, producing diverse posterior samples with uncertainty that correlates with reconstruction error.