Learning to Replace MCMC in Split-Gibbs Diffusion Posterior Sampling via Deep Unfolding
Organizations: Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
Abstract
Split Gibbs sampling enables diffusion posterior inference for general nonlinear inverse problems by decoupling prior and likelihood computations, allowing a pretrained diffusion prior to be reused across measurement models. However, its likelihood update often relies on iterative MCMC, which can hinder parallelization, require algorithm-specific tuning, and incur substantial computational cost. In this work, we propose a learning-based framework to replace this MCMC step by reformulating both Gibbs updates as Gaussian denoising problems and implementing them through ODE diffusion. The prior step reuses a pretrained denoiser, while the likelihood denoiser exploits known likelihood structure through a lightweight deep-unfolded network. Experiments on nonlinear phase retrieval demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method as an alternative to MCMC-based split Gibbs at lower likelihood-update cost.
Figures & tables
| MCMC | Proposed | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Likelihood update | 600 iter. | 800 iter. | 1000 iter. | 1200 iter. | 1400 iter. | 5 NFEs | 10 NFEs | 15 NFEs |
| Likelihood time (ms) | 289.964 | 386.634 | 483.589 | 579.937 | 676.557 | 48.624 | 97.061 | 145.566 |
| PSNR (dB) | 20.147 | 20.325 | 20.412 | 20.463 | 20.479 | 20.092 | 20.412 | 20.518 |
| SSIM | 0.5990 | 0.6032 | 0.6056 | 0.6068 | 0.6072 | 0.5997 | 0.6068 | 0.6091 |
Diffusion Posterior Sampling
Diffusion posterior sampling combines generative diffusion priors with measurement models to infer plausible solutions and uncertainty in inverse problems.
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