Diffusion Posterior Sampling

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4 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 58

Oct 7, 2026stat.ML

Kinetic Langevin Meets Split Gibbs: Accelerated Posterior Sampling for Imaging Inverse Problems with Diffusion Priors

Split Gibbs sampling (SGS) is a popular framework for posterior sampling in Bayesian imaging inverse problems. It decouples a Gaussian data-fidelity term from a complex prior through an auxiliary variable, so the data variable is updated exactly and only the prior-side conditional is hard to sample. Existing samplers treat this conditional in one of two ways. Plug-and-play SGS runs a multi-step diffusion denoiser at every iteration, which is expensive and lacks non-asymptotic guarantees. Langevin-within-SGS takes cheap overdamped Langevin steps but needs many iterations. We propose RED-KLwSGS, which keeps the exact Gaussian update for the data variable and updates the auxiliary variable with underdamped (kinetic) Langevin diffusions driven by a one-shot denoising score, at the same per-iteration cost as Langevin-within-SGS. We prove non-asymptotic Wasserstein-2 convergence in continuous and discrete time for strongly log-concave priors. We also introduce Joint-RED-KLwSGS, which applies kinetic Langevin diffusions to both variables. Experiments with Denoising diffusion probabilistic models as diffusion priors on FFHQ and ImageNet datasets show faster convergence and high-quality image reconstruction.

Dai Hai Nguyen, Duc Dung Nguyen

Hokkaido University · Institute of Information Technology, VAST

Bayesian Inverse Problems Markov Chain Monte Carlo Diffusion Posterior Sampling Langevin Dynamics Image Reconstruction

Oct 7, 2026cs.LG

Noise, Denoise, Correct: MCMC Posterior Sampling with Diffusion Priors in Three Steps

Pretrained diffusion models are powerful priors for inverse problems, but posterior sampling under nonlinear, non-differentiable forward models remain hard. We introduce diffusion waltz, an MCMC method using SDEdit-style noising-denoising as a proposal, corrected via Metropolis-Hastings for exact posterior sampling without prior evaluation. We further propose injecting observations into the proposal while preserving exactness, using a gradient-free ensemble Kalman update. On a non-differentiable Navier-Stokes initial condition recovery task, diffusion waltz outperforms existing baselines across different noise and nonlinearity regimes.

So Takao, Gregory David Bellchambers, Luke Ye +2

PhysicsX London, UK

Diffusion Posterior Sampling Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Oct 5, 2026stat.ML

Direct Intermediate Initialization for Tilted Diffusion Samplers

Some diffusion posterior samplers construct Gaussian-tilted intermediate distributions along the reverse process. We observe that these targets can be pulled back to clean-space posteriors with weaker conditioning, with samples transported analytically to the corresponding noisy-space target through a Gaussian bridge. For the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler MCGDiff, the effective observation variance of this pulled-back problem is up to twice the diffusion-noise variance. We exploit this structure to initialize MCGDiff directly at an intermediate time: an approximate solver samples the softened clean-space posterior, the Gaussian bridge maps these samples to the tilted target, and only the remaining SMC suffix is run. This trades asymptotic consistency for finite-particle performance. With moment-matching posterior sampling (MMPS) as the solver, the hybrid improves sliced Wasserstein distance by roughly

2\times

at matched particle count on a structured Gaussian-mixture inverse problem, and by more than an order of magnitude when the posterior-relevant mode is rare under the prior. A prior-initialization control, which retains the bridge but drops the clean-space conditioning, shows that on MCGDiff's standard Gaussian-mixture benchmark most of the improvement is insensitive to the conditioning. Conditioning the initialization gives a further consistent gain on the structured problem, and becomes decisive on a rare-mode problem, where resampling cannot repopulate a mode absent from the initial population.

Gregory D. Bellchambers

PhysicsX Ltd. London, EC2A 4DQ

Posterior Sampling Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling

Oct 5, 2026cs.CV

Frequency-Decoupled Diffusion Guidance for Non-Blind Image Deblurring

Pretrained diffusion models provide powerful image priors for training-free posterior sampling in image restoration. To guide this sampling process, frequency-aware methods progressively incorporate measurement information across frequency bands, facilitating coarse-to-fine reconstruction. However, existing methods typically do not explicitly separate frequency activation from degradation-induced attenuation, leaving attenuation differences among inactive frequencies insufficiently modeled. In this work, we propose frequency-decoupled posterior guidance to separate frequency activation from attenuation-aware spectral regularization. Specifically, a progressive low-to-high frequency schedule determines the active measurement band, while a kernel-derived attenuation map defines a selective spectral prior over inactive components. To stabilize the sampling process, we also introduce a local trajectory regularizer that suppresses spatially irregular state-to-clean deviations. For a fixed endpoint energy, we provide a KL-regularized path-space interpretation. In practice, we construct time-dependent guidance through local energy corrections using a Tweedie plug-in approximation. Experiments on natural-image benchmarks demonstrate strong PSNR and SSIM performance across challenging non-blind deblurring settings, even at higher measurement noise levels.

Sihan Wang, Jinshu Huang, Haibin Su +1

School of Mathematical Sciences, Nankai University, Tianjin, China. · Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Image Deblurring Frequency-Domain Image Processing Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

SNaP: One-Step Posterior Sampling for Noisy Inverse Problems

Diffusion and flow-matching models can produce high-quality posterior samples for inverse problems, but typically require tens to thousands of network evaluations per draw. MeanFlow enables one-step generation, yet applying it to inverse problems leaves no intermediate steps at which to enforce measurement consistency. We introduce SNaP, a one-step MeanFlow posterior sampler for linear inverse problems with Gaussian noise. Its central innovation is a measurement-adapted source: a Gaussian distribution whose mean and anisotropic covariance are determined by the measurement operator, observation, and noise level. The source anchors well-measured directions while preserving variation where the measurements are weak or uninformative. We show that the exact conditional flow transports this source to the true posterior. Across natural-image restoration and multi-coil MRI, SNaP produces diverse, high-quality samples with one network evaluation per draw, 30 to 2250

\times

faster than iterative samplers.

Shirin Shoushtari, Edward P. Chandler, Xiao Shi +1

WashU · UW-Madison

Flow Matching MeanFlow Posterior Sampling Accelerated MRI Reconstruction Flow-Based Generative Modeling Diffusion Posterior Sampling+1

Sep 27, 2026cs.CV

CLIMB-flow: Coupled Linear Inverse posterior sampling via Multiscale-Based flow

Diffusion models are now widely used in Bayesian inverse problems in imaging as priors, where latent diffusion models are often used for larger scale problems to keep the computational complexity and model-size manageable. Unfortunately, the auto-encoder based compression results in loss of spatial detail. In addition, the optimization is converted to a non-linear problem. In this paper, we introduce a posterior sampling algorithm customized for the pyramidal/cascaded architecture, which relies on a coarse to fine hierarchical strategy to generate images in the pixel domain. We present CLIMB-Flow which alternates between three steps: an end-point estimation from the current coarse and noisy image, data-consistent update of the clean image, and re-noising it back to the level the network expects. Together these steps sample the posterior at that scale using an approximate Gibbs sampling from two conditional distributions. Experiments on ImageNet, CelebA, AFHQ and fastMRI span inpainting, deblurring, super-resolution and accelerated MRI, with PSNR gains of 1.37-7.66 dB over the strongest competing method on CelebA and pixel-domain reconstruction up to 512x512.

Zeqiu Yu, Ruizhi Yuan, Mathews Jacob

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA · Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Diffusion Sampling Pixel-Space Diffusion Models Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling

Sep 24, 2026cs.LG

Generative Atmospheric Super-Resolution from Heterogeneous In Situ Observations through Composable Interfaces

Atmospheric observations are sparse, heterogeneous, and unevenly distributed, whereas many generative atmospheric models learn distributions over regularly gridded multivariate states. Once pretrained, diffusion models can supply atmospheric priors that can be combined with observation-derived likelihood factors in a Bayesian formulation. However, these observation sources differ substantially in geometry and sampling density, complicating the consistent use of their observations within a common inference framework. Here, we formulate this reconstruction problem as generative atmospheric super-resolution and introduce composable observation interfaces for conditioning a single pretrained 13-variable atmospheric diffusion model. The interfaces convert sparse radiosonde (R), clustered aircraft (A), and dense irregular surface-station (S) observations into source-specific likelihood factors that specify where observations constrain the gridded state, how residuals are counted under uneven sampling, and how strongly each source guides posterior sampling. We developed the aircraft and surface observation interfaces using 2019 observations and evaluated the selected interfaces throughout 2020 without further tuning. Compared with reconstructions conditioned only on radiosonde observations, the composed R+A+S interface reduces RMSE evaluated against ERA5 by

9.24\%

across all 13 state variables over the CONUS domain. The aircraft and surface factors provide complementary improvements in upper-air and surface variables. The R+A+S combination also lowers the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), while evaluations at held-out aircraft and surface-station observations show reduced prediction errors. Together, these results demonstrate a modular route for conditioning a pretrained atmospheric generative prior on heterogeneous in situ observations without retraining the underlying model.

Yang Xu, Dibyajyoti Chakraborty, Haiwen Guan +2

School of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA · College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

Bayesian Inverse Problems Data Assimilation Diffusion Posterior Sampling Image Super-Resolution

Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Physical-State-Guided Diffusion Sampling for Full-Waveform Inversion

Full waveform inversion (FWI) estimates subsurface velocity from seismic recordings, but its ill-posedness and nonlinearity make accurate reconstruction strongly dependent on initialization and prior information. Diffusion posterior sampling provides a learned geological prior, yet directly coupling its denoiser to the nonlinear wave solver can yield unreliable physical guidance. We propose Physical-State-Guided Diffusion Sampling (PSG), which couples a persistent physical velocity to the diffusion prior through a Gaussian bridge. The physical state is refined by waveform fitting regularized by the denoised velocity, and in turn guides the reverse diffusion process. This formulation separates the wave-equation and denoiser gradients while preserving conventional FWI initialization and accumulated optimization history. On four OpenFWI families, PSG's terminal denoised estimates outperform classical and diffusion-based baselines under clean and missing-trace acquisitions and maintain strong structural recovery under measurement noise. Repeated stochastic runs preserve the dominant geological structures, with ensemble variability concentrated near geological interfaces and positively associated with local inversion error. A frozen OpenFWI-trained prior further supports inversion of the larger Marmousi, Overthrust, and BP2004 Salt models, recovering complex geological structures without retraining.

Chen Min, Haowen Jiang, Zheng Ma +1

School of Mathematical Sciences, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · CMA-Shanghai, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · School of Mathematics and Statistics, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China

Physics-Informed Diffusion Models Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling PDE Inverse Problems Inverse Problems Image Inverse Problems

Aug 15, 2026stat.ML

A Posterior-Dynamics Framework for Imaging Inverse Problems with Pretrained Diffusion Priors

Pretrained diffusion models represent image distributions through a continuum of progressively smoothed distributions. This multiscale structure organizes generation from global structure to fine detail and supports high-quality, diverse samples. We exploit the same multiscale diffusion prior for linear imaging inverse problems. Rather than using the pretrained model only as a denoiser in an outer iteration, we define a surrogate likelihood whose center is aligned with the clean-image coordinate and whose covariance accounts for residual diffusion uncertainty. This construction defines an explicit surrogate posterior path, from which we derive continuous posterior dynamics. A tunable Langevin component supports target tracking and allows the amount of posterior exploration to be adapted to the application. We prove endpoint consistency and a finite-horizon tracking bound and, in the exact-score setting, first-order weak accuracy. For computation, we derive the Posterior-Dynamics Implicit--Explicit sampler (PD-IMEX), a stable method using one score evaluation per diffusion scale and an implicit data-consistency update. Experiments on deblurring, super-resolution, and inpainting show strong reconstruction quality at 100 score evaluations, coarse-grid stability, and controllable fidelity--diversity behavior.

Zhaoqiang Liu, Tongyao Pang, Ruibing Wang +1

School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China · Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, Shuangqing Complex, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Bayesian Inverse Problems Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling Image Inverse Problems

Jul 23, 2026eess.SP

RadioTrace: Transmitter-Aware Diffusion for Radio Map Estimation without Deployment-Time Fine-Tuning

Radio map (RM) estimation aims to reconstruct the spatial distribution of wireless signal characteristics, such as received signal strength (RSS), from sparse measurements, a task that is critical for spectrum management, interference mitigation, and localization in modern wireless networks. Traditional approaches, including interpolation and deep learning, either struggle to capture complex propagation effects or require large-scale retraining for each new sampling pattern, which limits their generalization. More recently, prior-based methods have combined pre-trained generative models with measurements to reduce the need for deployment-time model fine-tuning, but they typically treat the prior as a simple regularizer and lack explicit transmitter-aware integration. In this paper, we propose RadioTrace, a novel RM estimation framework without deployment-time fine-tuning that tightly integrates sparse RSS measurements with a frozen pre-trained diffusion prior. RadioTrace incorporates transmitter (Tx) location estimation directly into the denoising loop, iteratively refining Tx coordinates based on reconstruction quality to guide the generative process. To further enhance robustness, we introduce a propagation-guided K-means initialization that mitigates poor local minima in the Tx update and provides a geometry-consistent starting point. Moreover, we provide a stochastic stability analysis for the Tx-coordinate refinement component, showing that the Tx update remains stable under perturbations induced by diffusion sampling and Tx-map relaxation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RadioTrace achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art learning-based methods under random sampling, and maintains strong reconstruction quality under restricted-area sampling, highlighting its adaptability, robustness, and practical relevance.

Liu Yang, Qiang Li, Zhuo Cao +3

School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China, 611731 · School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China, 611731, and also with Tianfu Jiangxi Laboratory, Chengdu, China, 641419

Wireless Communications Diffusion Posterior Sampling

Jul 21, 2026astro-ph.IM

Strong Gravitational Lensing Posterior Sampling in Pixel-Space Using Diffusion Models and Recurrent Inference Machines

Modeling galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lenses to infer the brightness of the source galaxy and the mass distribution of the foreground galaxy is computationally challenging, particularly for high-resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio observations. In this regime, high-dimensional representations of both the source and the foreground mass distribution are necessary to model the data down to the noise level. This inference problem has been challenging for both traditional and machine learning-based methods because of its high dimensionality and its non-linearity in the foreground mass distribution. We present a method to generate joint posterior samples of the source galaxy and foreground mass distribution as pixelated images conditioned on observations. The method combines diffusion-based generative modeling and recurrent inference machines. It can model realistic gravitational lensing simulations with background and foreground galaxies drawn from cosmological hydrodynamical simulations down to the noise level.

Guillaume Payeur, Laurence Perreault-Levasseur, Gabriel Missael Barco +1

Department of Physics, Universit´e de Montr´eal, Montreal QC, Canada · 2Mila - Quebec AI Institute, Montreal QC, Canada · 3Ciela Institute, Institute for Astrophysics and Machine Learning, Montreal QC, Canada +3

Pixel-Space Diffusion Models Diffusion Posterior Sampling

Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

Provable diffusion-based posterior sampling for linear inverse problems via DDIM

Diffusion-based methods have achieved remarkable empirical success in solving inverse problems. However, many existing posterior samplers either lack rigorous theoretical guarantees or incur substantial computational overhead. We propose a simple and efficient algorithm, called \pddim, for solving linear inverse problems with diffusion priors via a DDIM-type sampler. Our method requires only lightweight, coordinate-wise modifications to the standard DDIM update, while explicitly incorporating the measurement model. The key idea is to perform posterior sampling separately along each singular direction of the measurement operator: for each direction, the sampler follows the learned diffusion prior when the observation signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is below the corresponding diffusion SNR, and switches to a calibrated measurement-based predictor otherwise. We prove that the proposed sampler converges to the Bayesian posterior conditioned on the measurements. Empirical results show that the proposed sampler performs favorably against existing diffusion-based posterior samplers across a range of image restoration tasks, achieving the best performance on the majority of evaluation metrics considered. Overall, our results convert posterior sampling for noisy linear inverse problems to simple coordinate-wise DDIM updates, yielding an efficient, easy-to-implement algorithm with provable posterior consistency.

Yuchen Jiao, Na Li, Changxiao Cai +2

Department of Statistics and Data Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong · Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA · Department of Statistics and Data Science, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Bayesian Inverse Problems Diffusion Sampling Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling Inverse Problems

Jul 14, 2026eess.IV

Exact and Calibrated Diffusion Reconstruction for Digital Breast Tomosynthesis

Limited-angle digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) reconstructs a volume from a few low-dose projections over a narrow arc. At a representative nine-view,

25^{\circ}

protocol more than 98% of image space is unmeasured, so a learned prior must supply structure in the missing wedge. Conditional diffusion priors achieve strong perceptual quality here but leave three clinical obstacles: inexact data consistency, unlocalized hallucination, and uncalibrated uncertainty. We enforce measurements exactly by replacing the per-step proximal update of a conditional diffusion sampler with exact Euclidean projection onto the data-consistent set, computed via an

m

-dimensional dual system with a one-time Gram matrix

AA^{\top}

factorization. This projection costs 4.5 ms per step (a

248\times

speedup) and drives the data residual to the double-precision floor (

2.4\times10^{-13}

). We prove it is the

ρ\to0

limit of the proximal step, provide a no-harm theorem, and show that exactly consistent sample ensembles have variance supported on null(

A

). Thus, the mean's entire error lies in the unmeasured subspace covered by the uncertainty map. On patient-derived breast phantoms, this improves fidelity at no depth-resolution cost. Conversely, a proximal step applied post-update degrades quality, isolating the consistency step's placement as decisive. Isotonic recalibration brings the ensemble spread to a calibrated error scale (expected calibration error

0.029\to0.008

; standardized error

4.7\to0.96

), ranking errors better than the pure prior. We also repair a 20.3% adjoint mismatch in a deployed projector via a materialized operator of record. This is the first data-consistent, uncertainty-calibrated learned reconstruction for limited-angle DBT. The solver naturally relaxes to discrepancy-ball and maximum-a-posteriori modes for noisy measurements.

Imade Bouftini

Image Reconstruction Sparse-View CT Reconstruction Computed Tomography Diffusion Posterior Sampling Uncertainty Calibration

Jul 6, 2026physics.geo-ph

Joint Velocity Slope Diffusion Prior for Structurally Constrained Velocity Model Building

High-resolution velocity models are crucial for reservoir characterization and subsurface delineation. However, the band limited nature of our surface recorded data limits resolution. Utilizing well measurements to enhance the resolution of our subsurface models is an important objective. To this end, we present a diffusion-guided framework for structurally preconditioned velocity-model reconstruction from sparse well-log information. The proposed approach combines plane-wave PDE regularization, structurally preconditioned inversion, and measurement-guided diffusion posterior sampling within a unified formulation. Local structural slopes estimated through plane-wave destruction are used both to propagate well information along geological dip directions and to guide the diffusion sampling process through a joint velocity--slope generative prior. Numerical experiments on the Volve synthetic model and the Viking Graben field dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework improves structural continuity, lateral consistency, and geological realism compared with conventional structurally preconditioned inversion approaches while maintaining computationally practical inference through DDIM sampling.

Francesco Brandolin, Tariq Alkhalifah

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Thuwal, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Seismology Diffusion Posterior Sampling PDE Inverse Problems

Jun 30, 2026cs.CV

Accelerated Likelihood Maximization for Diffusion-based Versatile Content Generation

Generating diverse, coherent, and plausible content from partially given inputs remains a fundamental challenge for diffusion models. Existing approaches face clear limitations: training-based approaches offer strong task-specific results but require costly computation, and they generalize poorly across tasks. Training-free approaches offer better efficiency, but they do not explicitly optimize over unobserved variables, leading to globally inconsistent results. To address these limitations, we introduce Accelerated Likelihood Maximization (ALM), a novel training-free sampling strategy integrated into the reverse diffusion process that significantly extends the applicability of diffusion models beyond simple generation tasks. Unlike previous methods that implicitly influence missing regions through pre-generated region constraints, we directly optimize the unobserved region during the sampling process, enabling globally coherent and plausible generation. Furthermore, we incorporate an acceleration strategy that significantly improves computational efficiency without sacrificing performance. Experimental results demonstrate that ALM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various data domains and tasks, establishing a powerful paradigm for versatile content generation.

Hyunsoo Lee, Inwoo Hwang, Young Min Kim

ECE, Seoul National University · INMC & IPAI, Seoul National University

Diffusion Sampling Diffusion Model Acceleration Conditional Generative Modeling Diffusion Posterior Sampling

Jun 27, 2026cs.CV

Stochastic Optimal Control Sampling for Diffusion Inverse Problems

Benefiting from the strong ability to capture data distributions, diffusion models have become powerful tools for solving image inverse problems. The key is to controllably steer the sampling trajectory toward the measurements while respecting the diffusion prior. In this work, we introduce Stochastic Optimal Control Sampling (SOCS), which models the denoising process as a dynamical system and injects control signals via SOC. Previous SOC-based approach addresses inverse problems by optimizing over the entire trajectory, which is computationally expensive. In contrast, we derive a closed-form control update and apply it at each sampling step, pulling the measurement-consistent clean prediction back onto the denoising flow. In SOCS, we can readily modulate the control strength to align with the diffusion model's native capabilities and thereby enhance perceptual quality. Our method is compatible with a variety of linear stochastic differential equation backbones. Extensive experiments across a broad spectrum of image inverse tasks demonstrate that SOCS achieves accurate measurement-aligned reconstructions with improved visual fidelity and stronger quantitative performance.

Jie Zhang, Youmei Qiu, Hanling Tian +3

School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · Shanghai Key Laboratory of Flexible Medical Robotics, Tongren Hospital, Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

Stochastic Optimal Control Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling Image Inverse Problems

Jun 26, 2026eess.IV

Measured-Subspace Consistency: A Plug-and-Play Operator for Diffusion Posterior Sampling in Accelerated MRI Reconstruction

Diffusion posterior samplers for accelerated MRI can reconstruct accurately yet still disagree on the acquired k-space across samples, placing posterior variability on coefficients the scanner has already measured. We identify this measured-subspace leakage as a physical-admissibility failure. Under a hard-constraint model it violates the measurement constraint and inflates the reported uncertainty with disagreement about coefficients the scanner has already determined. To quantify this leakage, we introduce complementary measured- and unmeasured-subspace k-space dispersion metrics (MSD/USD). We then present Measured-Subspace Consistency (MSC), a training-free terminal correction that wraps any compatible image-space posterior sampler with a standard multi-coil consistency lock. The ideal lock follows classical range/null-space data consistency. Our contribution is to repurpose it as a black-box posterior audit and correction rather than a new reconstructor or learned sampler. Theoretically, we prove that the ideal transform confines pairwise sample differences to the MRI null space and bound the residual cross-subspace coupling left by practical sensitivity-weighted implementations. Across six base samplers and two MRI anatomies, including out-of-distribution transfer where a knee prior reconstructs brain, MSC substantially reduces measured-subspace dispersion for Soft samplers (a median 16.5x reduction for DPS across five brain contrasts, up to ~29x), while preserving unmeasured-subspace diversity and acting as a near-identity map for Consistent ones. Furthermore, MSC maintains or modestly improves PSNR/SSIM, with no retraining, retuning, or significant computational overhead.

Junhyeok Lee, Kyu Sung Choi

Interdisciplinary Program in Cancer Biology, Seoul National University College of Medicine · Department of Radiology, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Seoul National University Hospital · Healthcare AI Research Institute, Seoul National University Hospital

Bayesian Inverse Problems Accelerated MRI Reconstruction Magnetic Resonance Imaging Diffusion MRI Diffusion Posterior Sampling

Jun 25, 2026cs.CE

Latent Diffusion Posterior Sampling with Surrogate Likelihood Guidance for PDE Inverse Problems

We propose latent-space diffusion posterior sampling (L-DPS), an approximate Bayesian framework for high-dimensional inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). The method addresses three challenges in PDE-constrained inversion: implicit sample-based priors without tractable densities, high-dimensional spatially distributed parameters, and the high cost of repeated forward-model evaluations during posterior sampling. L-DPS combines a variational autoencoder, an unconditional latent diffusion model, diffusion posterior sampling, and a differentiable neural surrogate. The VAE maps the parameter field to a lower-dimensional latent space, the diffusion model learns an implicit prior score in this latent space, and DPS combines this learned prior with likelihood-based guidance. The likelihood gradient is evaluated through the decoder-surrogate composition, avoiding repeated calls to the full numerical PDE solver. We evaluate the method on an inverse Darcy flow problem with an unknown spatially distributed permeability field inferred from sparse and noisy pressure observations. L-DPS produces accurate and robust inverse solutions, reduces inference cost relative to full-space DPS, and outperforms amortized inverse baselines such as conditional latent diffusion and inverse FNO in sparse and noisy regimes. We further compare L-DPS with a KLE-MAP baseline and study mixed-prior generalization and the sensitivity of inversion accuracy to surrogate forward-model error.

Yuanzhe Wang, Alexandre M. Tartakovsky

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL 61801

Latent Diffusion Models Bayesian Inverse Problems Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling PDE Inverse Problems

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

BayesFP: Posterior Estimation for Flow-Based Policies via Feynman-Kac Sampling

Robots must generate trajectories that remain faithful to learned expert behavior while satisfying safety constraints and task-specific objectives specified only at inference time. We formulate constrained trajectory generation for pretrained diffusion and flow-matching policies as Bayesian posterior sampling, with the learned demonstration distribution as a prior and an inference-time, cost-derived likelihood tilting it toward feasible, optimal trajectories. To sample from this posterior without any retraining of the base policy, we leverage the Feynman--Kac corrector framework, originally formulated for diffusion models, and extend it to deterministic flow-matching policies. The result is a unified, inference-time, retraining-free sampler for diffusion and flow policies. We validate the approach on pretrained Diffusion Policy, GR00T-N1.6, and

π_{0.5}

checkpoints across simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, including planning around non-convex obstacles introduced at inference time, and show improvements over the base

π_{0.5}

on zero-shot tasks.

Sreevardhan Sirigiri, Weiming Zhi, Fabio Ramos

School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Australia · Australian Centre For Robotics, The University of Sydney, Australia · College of Connected Computing, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA. +1

Robot Policy Learning Trajectory Generation Diffusion Policy Flow-Based Generative Modeling Diffusion Posterior Sampling

Jun 15, 2026cs.LG

Exact Posterior Score Estimation for Solving Linear Inverse Problems

Diffusion and flow-based models learn powerful data priors by training a denoiser to reverse Gaussian corruption. To use this prior to solve a linear inverse problem, one needs to sample from the posterior, but the score that the prior provides is the unconditional score, not the posterior score. Existing methods either steer a fixed pretrained denoiser with approximate measurement-matching corrections, or train a conditional restoration model that abandons the denoising structure of the prior. We derive the exact posterior score in closed form for linear Gaussian inverse problems under general Gaussian interpolants, and show that posterior sampling reduces to a denoising problem at an operator-dependent shifted pivot under an anisotropic noise covariance. We turn this identity into Exact Posterior Score (EPS), a denoising training objective that preserves the input/output structure of standard pretraining and can therefore be trained from scratch or fine-tuned from a pretrained denoiser. At inference, EPS uses the same sampler as the underlying backbone, with no likelihood gradients or projections. We evaluate EPS on five linear inverse problems across FFHQ and ImageNet, where it outperforms training-free and training-based baselines on fidelity, perceptual, and distributional metrics, while using roughly an order of magnitude fewer denoiser evaluations than gradient-based posterior samplers.

Abbas Mammadov, Ozgur Kara, Kaan Oktay +5

University of Oxford · UIUC · fal +1

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Score-Based Generative Modeling Diffusion Posterior Sampling Inverse Problems

Jun 10, 2026cs.LG

A Stabilized Path-Space Approach to Diffusion-Based Posterior Sampling

Diffusion models provide expressive data-driven priors for Bayesian inverse problems, but many diffusion posterior samplers rely on heuristic guidance approximations that can fail for nonlinear operators and multimodal posteriors. In this work, we develop a stabilized path-space framework for diffusion-based posterior sampling. Starting from a base diffusion process whose terminal marginal represents the prior, we define a likelihood-weighted target measure on trajectories and cast posterior sampling as learning a controlled stochastic process whose path measure matches this target. This formulation connects diffusion posterior sampling to stochastic optimal control while preserving the Bayesian structure needed for uncertainty quantification. We introduce a time reparameterization that makes the path-space control problem well posed by removing the bias induced by the unknown initial value function, without auxiliary training. We then learn the control via a trust-region path-space optimization method with log-variance objectives. The path-space perspective also unifies our learned control approach with existing guidance-based samplers, quantifies the sampling error induced by approximate controls, and yields importance sampling corrections for asymptotically exact posterior expectations. We evaluate the proposed framework on a suite of benchmark inverse problems with analytically characterized or high-quality reference posteriors, enabling principled assessment of sampling accuracy and uncertainty quantification. These experiments provide insight into the behavior of diffusion-based posterior samplers and demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness over leading approaches.

Evan Scope Crafts, Umberto Villa, Saviz Mowlavi +3

Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX · Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX · Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Cambridge, MA

Bayesian Inverse Problems Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling

Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

The Right Measure for Physics-Constrained Generation: A Co-Area Correction for Posterior-Consistent PDE Inverse Problems

Generative models -- diffusion and flow matching -- are increasingly used to solve partial differential equation (PDE) inverse problems, enforcing the governing physics as a \emph{hard constraint} (via projection or guidance) and reporting the resulting samples as a Bayesian posterior with calibrated uncertainty. We show that this widely adopted recipe samples the wrong distribution. Conditioning a generative prior on a hard PDE constraint is conditioning on a measure-zero manifold -- an operation that is intrinsically ambiguous (the Borel--Kolmogorov paradox) and whose physically correct resolution, the small-residual-noise limit, carries a co-area (Fixman) Jacobian factor

[det(JJ^{\top})]^{-1/2}

that projection- and guidance-based methods silently omit. We make the bias precise, show that it grows with the heterogeneity of the constraint sensitivity, and validate it on controlled problems against an \emph{i.i.d.} ground-truth arbiter. The omitted factor is not a second-order detail: removing it inflates the posterior error to

20\times

the sampling-noise floor; minimal-displacement projection (as in PCFM) is biased at

9\times

the floor; and a naive scalar reweighting does not fix it. We introduce \textbf{CoCoS}, a measure-aware constrained sampler that targets the correct co-area posterior, and show that it matches the gold-standard posterior to within sampling noise. Our results imply that satisfying the physics'' is not the same as sampling the posterior,'' and give a principled correction for uncertainty-aware scientific inference.

Jian Xu, Yanning Wu, Delu Zeng +2

1RIKEN iTHEMS · 2RIKEN AIP · 3South China University of Technology +1

Constrained Generative Modeling Physics-Informed Generative Modeling Bayesian Inverse Problems Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling PDE Inverse Problems

Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

Correcting Neural Operator Spectral Bias via Diffusion Posterior Sampling with Sparse Observations

Neural operator surrogates (NO) approximate PDE solutions orders of magnitude faster than numerical solvers, but suffer from spectral bias: high-frequency content is systematically attenuated, limiting reliability where fine-scale structure matters. Sparse sensor measurements of the field are often available too, offering pointwise accuracy without spectral distortion but covering only a small fraction of the domain. We address this by treating NO predictions as auxiliary observations in a diffusion posterior sampling framework. Our method, FreqNO-DPS (https://github.com/niccoloperrone/FreqNO-DPS), combines an unconditional score-based diffusion prior, trained on high-fidelity simulations, with diffusion posterior sampling (DPS) conditioned on sparse observations and guided by a frozen neural operator. Naive integration reintroduces the surrogate's spectral bias; we resolve this with a closed-form, spectrally shaped guidance score that weights the surrogate by its frequency-dependent accuracy and needs no denoiser backpropagation. A distribution-free analysis bounds the approximation error across the frequency-diffusion-time plane and shows the guidance's frequency dependence is preserved regardless of distributional assumptions. On 3D elastic wavefield prediction at 5% and 2% sensor coverage, the method reaches near-zero spectral bias across all bands, where both the surrogate and sensor-only DPS show systematic high-frequency attenuation. Isotropic guidance, the natural baseline, improves pointwise accuracy but carries the bias into the posterior nearly intact, confirming that frequency-dependent calibration is essential, not merely beneficial. The framework needs only paired surrogate/reference data and exploits no problem-specific structure beyond the residual's approximate spectral diagonality, verifiable for new surrogates via the coherence diagnostic we provide.

Niccolò Perrone, Fanny Lehmann, Stefania Fresca +1

Université Paris-Saclay, CentraleSupélec, CNRS, ENS Paris-Saclay · Laboratoire de Mécanique Paris-Saclay UMR 9026 · 8-10 rue Joliot Curie, 91190 Gif-sur-Yvette, France +5

PDE Surrogate Modeling Spectral Bias Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling Neural Operators

Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

Bayesian Tensor Decomposition with Diffusion Model Prior

Low-rank tensor decomposition (TD) is usually effective on clean, fully observed data, but it often degrades under severe missingness or noise. Low-rankness is itself a useful but limited structural prior, and additional handcrafted priors (e.g., sparsity or smoothness) still fall short of capturing the rich statistics of real-world data. To compensate for this weak inductive bias under heavy corruption, one would like to inject a learned, data-driven prior; however, the state-of-the-art diffusion models are not readily compatible with current TD and tractable posterior inference. To address these challenges, we introduce DiffBCP, a hybrid-prior Bayesian CP decomposition framework that couples a cumulative shrinkage process prior over the CP factors for automatic rank selection with an off-the-shelf pre-trained diffusion model as an implicit data prior on the reconstructed tensor. To make posterior inference tractable despite the coupling among the likelihood, low-rank constraint, and diffusion prior, we develop a split Gibbs sampler: CP factors admit conjugate updates, while the diffusion block is sampled via low-rank-guided denoising. A noise-adaptive coupling schedule further reduces sensitivity to hand-tuned annealing. Experiments on image inpainting and denoising, including high-resolution out-of-distribution images, show consistent gains over Bayesian, nonlinear, and plug-and-play TD baselines.

Zerui Tao, Qibin Zhao

RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP), Tokyo, Japan.

Bayesian Inverse Problems Tensor Decomposition Diffusion Posterior Sampling

Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

Hallucination-Aware Diffusion Sampling for Inverse Problems via Robust Prior Updates

Diffusion-based inverse problem solvers can produce realistic reconstructions, but realism alone does not ensure that the recovered details are supported by the measurement. We study this failure as measurement-conditioned hallucination: visually meaningful content that is either implausible or inconsistent with the measured instance. Our analysis separates Bayes-rule-based diffusion inverse solvers into a prior update and a measurement-conditioning step, showing that hallucinated content can enter through the prior-side proposal before the measurement correction is applied. Motivated by this view, we propose Robust Prior Update (RPU), a solver-level module that probes the local stability of the diffusion prior update, re-anchors the resulting displacement at the current iterate, and leaves the measurement update unchanged. We instantiate RPU in DPS and evaluate it on FFHQ and ImageNet inverse problems using automatic metrics and human faithfulness studies. On FFHQ, RPU improves PSNR and LPIPS over DPS across box inpainting, Gaussian deblurring, and motion deblurring. In human judgments, RPU receives 91.9% of blind non-tie majority preferences and 91.1% of ground-truth-assisted non-tie preferences on FFHQ box inpainting, while the ImageNet Gaussian reader study is tie-heavy but favors RPU among non-tie cases. These results support a targeted claim: robustifying the prior update can improve instance faithfulness in diffusion inverse solvers, especially when the prior shapes weakly constrained content.

Pengfei Jin, Yiqi Tian, Kailong Fan +2

Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114 · Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15261

Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Hallucination Mitigation Diffusion Posterior Sampling Image Inverse Problems

May 30, 2026astro-ph.CO

Generative Diffusion Priors for 3D Mapping of the Dark Universe

Reconstructing the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter from weak-lensing observations is a central but highly ill-posed inverse problem in cosmology. Unlike standard 3D reconstruction with multiple viewpoints, we observe the universe from a single line of sight, through noisy shape distortions of galaxies with uncertain distances, so meaningful recovery of the 3D matter field requires strong prior assumptions. Existing methods either produce point estimates with handcrafted priors or use neural ensembles for approximate Bayesian uncertainty, and struggle to capture the non-Gaussian, filamentary structure of the cosmic web. With the advent of new high-resolution cosmological simulations, we now have an alternative source of prior knowledge that captures the nonlinear statistics of structure formation with far greater fidelity than analytic prescriptions. We leverage these simulations to build a new dataset

\texttt{Conicus3D}

, which enables us to learn a data-driven diffusion-model prior capturing the full 3D distribution of dark matter structure across cosmic time. Building on recent plug-and-play approaches, we modify a diffusion-based posterior sampling scheme to the 3D weak-lensing setting, combining the learned prior with a differentiable physical forward model. On realistic simulations targeting a modern weak lensing survey, our approach yields substantially improved 2D and 3D reconstruction accuracy over baseline methods. Moreover, it produces posterior samples whose statistics closely track the underlying simulations, while remaining robust to moderate shifts in cosmology.

Brandon Zhao, Diana Scognamiglio, Olivier Doré +1

Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, California Institute of Technology · Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology · Department of Physics, Duke University +1

3D Reconstruction Bayesian Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling Diffusion Models

May 28, 2026cs.LG

When, why, and how do diffusion posterior samplers fail? A finite-sample lens

Diffusion models have excellent capacity to model complex distributions of natural data, which has made them a popular and effective choice for posterior sampling in imaging inverse problems. Existing methods can incorporate any measurement model at inference time but must use an inexact approximation for the likelihood at intermediate timesteps for computational tractability. Although these approximations can often work well empirically, their downstream effect on the sampled posterior is poorly understood and can result in unexplained failures. To understand when, why, and how these likelihood approximations propagate to erroneous posterior distributions, we introduce a finite-sample perspective on posterior sampling that approximates the posterior to arbitrary precision as training set size tends towards infinity, for any forward model and prior distribution. Using this finite-sample lens, we observe that popular posterior sampling approximations tend to under- or over-estimate the spread of the posterior at intermediate timesteps, causing downstream consequences including sensitivity to early stopping time, inaccurate relative weighting of posterior modes, and hallucination, both of prior modes that are not in the posterior and likelihood modes that are not supported by the prior. Moreover, we find that the cause of these posterior errors requires neither a nonlinear measurement model nor a multimodal posterior, but can arise solely due to a multimodal prior and inaccurate posterior spread at intermediate sampling times. Our finite-sample posterior sampling approach is agnostic to the type of likelihood approximation and the type of (linear or nonlinear) forward model, and can thus serve as a drop-in diagnostic to evaluate the accuracy and failure modes of existing and future posterior samplers.

Benjamin A. Burns, Sara Fridovich-Keil

Georgia Institute of Technology

Bayesian Inverse Problems Posterior Sampling Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling

May 27, 2026cs.LG

Stage-wise Distortion-Perception Traversal in Zero-shot Inverse Problems with Diffusion Models

The distortion-perception (D-P) tradeoff is a fundamental phenomenon of Bayesian inverse problems, which characterizes the inherent tension between distortion performance and perceptual quality. Enabling flexible traversal of the D-P tradeoff at inference time is crucial for practical applications. Despite the recent success of diffusion models in zero-shot inverse problem solving, efficient and principled strategies for D-P traversal in diffusion-based inverse algorithms remain inadequately characterized. In this paper, we propose a stage-wise framework for realizing D-P traversal using a single diffusion model in zero-shot inverse problems. Our proposed method, termed MAP-RPS, starts with an MAP estimation stage that approximates the MMSE solution and provides a low-distortion initialization, followed by a re-noised posterior sampling stage that progressively improves perceptual quality. We provide theoretical analyses for both stages, establishing the validity and effectiveness of the proposed design. Furthermore, we extend MAP-RPS to the latent space, yielding LMAP-RPS, which enjoys broader applicability by leveraging large-scale pre-trained latent diffusion backbones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAP-RPS and LMAP-RPS enable more effective D-P traversal on various tasks, while also exhibiting strong performance as efficient solvers for real-world inverse problems.

Jiawei Zhang, Ziyuan Liu, Leon Yan +2

Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China.

Bayesian Inverse Problems Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling Distortion-Perception Tradeoff Inverse Problems

May 27, 2026cs.LG

Geometry-Correct Diffusion Posterior Sampling with Denoiser-Pullback Curvature Guidance and Manifold-Aligned Damping

Diffusion posterior sampling conditions diffusion priors on measurements, but data-consistency updates are typically scaled by hand-tuned guidance weights and can destabilize sampling under stiff, operator-dependent curvature. We replace scalar guidance with a per-noise-level damped Gauss--Newton correction computed in diffusion-state coordinates. The correction pulls likelihood gradients back through the denoiser, uses a one-sided curvature model that avoids forward denoiser Jacobians, and applies diffusion-calibrated rank-one damping aligned with the denoiser residual. Each correction is solved with matrix-free GMRES using automatic differentiation, and sampling proceeds with a variance-preserving Langevin transition with a closed-form drift/noise split. On FFHQ and ImageNet across inverse problems, it achieves competitive PSNR/SSIM/LPIPS while running markedly faster than most of the compared baselines; on accelerated MRI reconstruction, it achieves the best PSNR/SSIM among the compared baselines.

Seunghyeok Shin, Minwoo Kim, Dabin Kim +1

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Inha University, Incheon, 22212, South Korea.

Gauss-Newton Optimization Bayesian Inverse Problems Diffusion Guidance Second-Order Optimization Accelerated MRI Reconstruction Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems+1

May 26, 2026cs.CV

Triadic Dynamics Aware Diffusion Posterior Sampling for Inverse Problems: Optimizing Guidance and Stochasticity Schedules

Generative posterior sampling using diffusion models has emerged as a dominant paradigm for solving inverse problems in imaging, which usually consists of three main components: data consistency (DC) guidance, classifier-free guidance (CFG) and stochasticity. While prior arts have focused on how to develop each or all components, less attention has given to how to schedule them, leading to heuristically fixed or partially adjusted suboptimal schedules. In this work, we argue that the interactions among all three components in terms of scheduling are crucial for significantly improved performance in solving inverse problems in imaging. Our analysis shows that aggressive CFG early in sampling conflict with DC guidance, while stochasticity brings the trajectory back to higher-probability regions. Based on these findings, we propose Triadic Dynamics Aware Posterior Sampling (TriPS), which reformulates posterior sampling as a time-varying control problem and optimizes schedules following a triadic trend of decreasing DC and stochasticity scales alongside increasing CFG scale. TriPS achieves this through two strategies: template-based search over functional priors for reliable baseline schedules, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)-based reinforcement learning for more flexible temporal curves. Experiments demonstrate TriPS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in data fidelity and perceptual realism.

Junseo Bang, Dong Ju Mun, Hoigi Seo +2

Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering · INMC · IPAI & AIIS

Diffusion Model Guidance Diffusion Timestep Scheduling Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Diffusion Posterior Sampling Image Inverse Problems