Image Inverse Problems

Ask about this topic

Overview

Image inverse problems arise when measurements are blurred, undersampled, noisy, or transformed by an imperfectly known imaging system, as in MRI, CT, microscopy, and remote sensing. Methods combine physical forward models with iterative optimization and regularization, learned or unrolled networks, and plug-and-play denoisers; newer approaches also use diffusion and flow-based generative priors for restoration and posterior sampling. Work spans tasks such as deblurring, inpainting, super-resolution, sparse-view tomography, and phase retrieval, with training-free and self-supervised methods addressing settings where paired data are scarce. A central tension is how to use strong learned priors to fill in missing information without hallucinating details, while maintaining measurement fidelity, uncertainty estimates, robustness to model mismatch, and reliable convergence at practical computational cost.

Latest papers

CardsList

119 papers14 papers in the last four weeks, up 8% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Image Modeling: From Handcrafted Priors to Foundation Image Models

    Oct 27, 2026A. Murat TekalpImage Inverse ProblemsConditional Generative Modeling

    Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Koc¸ University, Istanbul, Turkey

  2. Hilbert-Scale Stability of Posterior Diffusion Priors for Ill-Posed Signal Recovery

    Oct 19, 2026Bahman Moraffah, Raha MoraffahDiffusion-Based Inverse ProblemsDiffusion Posterior Sampling

    Department of Computer Science, Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

  3. Measurement-Adaptive Light-Cone Transform for Robust Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging

    Oct 16, 2026Lianfang Wang, Xueying Liu, Junnan Dong +4Image ReconstructionImage Inverse Problems

    School of Mathematical Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China · School of Physics, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China

  4. Learning the Shared Latent Structure of Cryo-EM Inverse Problems

    Oct 15, 2026Nithin Chalapathi, Theo Sternlieb, Ethan Han +4Cryo-Electron MicroscopyImage Inverse Problems

    University of California, Berkeley · Flatiron Institute · University of Maryland, College Park

  5. Structure-aware Bayesian full waveform inversion via diffusion-regularized Stein variational gradient descent

    Oct 13, 2026Chao Li, Mrinal K. Sen, Sergey Fomel +1Seismic ImagingBayesian Inverse Problems

    The University of Texas at Austin

  6. Deeply unrolled alternating projections for phase retrieval

    Oct 12, 2026Jiayi Yao, Vasileios Charisopoulos, Rebecca WillettImage Inverse ProblemsDeep Learning Optimization

    Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Washington · NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology · Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago +3

  7. Full Waveform Inversion with a Learned Preconditioner

    Oct 11, 2026Jeongjin ParkSeismic ImagingInverse Problems

  8. Self-attention summary networks for subsurface velocity-model building from common-image gathers

    Oct 7, 2026Shiqin Zeng, Yunlin Zeng, Abhinav Prakash Gahlot +2Seismic ImagingInverse Problems

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  9. Twist Flow for Inverse Problems

    Oct 7, 2026Shiqin Zeng, Zijun Deng, Felix J. HerrmannBayesian Inverse ProblemsPosterior Sampling

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  10. UltraDiff: Differentiable Ray Tracing in Ultrasound for Shape Optimization

    Oct 6, 2026Felix Duelmer, Magdalena Wysocki, Nassir Navab +1Differentiable RenderingUltrasound Imaging

    Technical University of Munich & Munich Center for Machine Learning

  11. Geometry-Aware Diffusion Approximate Posterior Sampling for Sparse-View and Limited-Angle CT

    Oct 5, 2026Honglei Brinkmann, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Ander BiguriSparse-View CT ReconstructionComputed Tomography

    Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

  12. Consecutive Posterior Fusion for Diffusive Recovery of Unobservable Image Structures

    Oct 2, 2026Elena Morotti, Davide Evangelista, Elena Loli PiccolominiDiffusion-Based Inverse ProblemsImage Inverse Problems

    Department of Computer Science and Engineerin University of Bologna Bologna, 40126, Italy

  13. A hybrid CNN-adjoint optimization framework for reconstruction of viscoelastic tissue properties in magnetic resonance elastography

    Oct 2, 2026Anwesa Dey, Johann Rudi, Elena CherkaevImage Inverse ProblemsMagnetic Resonance Imaging

    Department of Mathematics, The University of Utah, address USA. · Department of Mathematics, Virginia Tech, address USA. · Department of Mathematics, The University of Utah, address, address, USA.

  14. Principled MAP estimation for inverse problems: bridging the gap between convergence and performance

    Sep 29, 2026Alexandre Lagier, Valentine Tosel, Anne Gagneux +2Bayesian Inverse ProblemsBayesian Inference

    ENS de Lyon, CNRS, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Inria, LIP UMR 5668, 69342 Lyon Cedex 07, France · Univ. Bordeaux, Inria, Bordeaux INP, IMB, UMR 5251, F-33400 Talence, France · Inria, ENS de Lyon, CNRS, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, LIP UMR 5668, 69342 Lyon Cedex 07, France

  15. Livin' on a Prior: Likelihood Score Approximation for Inverse Problems

    Sep 28, 2026Rostislav Makarov, Tal Peer, Danilo de Oliveira +1Conditional Generative ModelingInverse Problems

    Signal Processing University of Hamburg Hamburg, Germany

  16. Convergent Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Annealed Noise Levels

    Sep 26, 2026Samuel HuraultConvergence AnalysisImage Restoration

    LIGM, CNRS, Univ. Gustave Eiffel

  17. Image Reconstruction from Phase with Untrained Neural Priors

    Sep 25, 2026Ene Meco, Ahmet Enis CetinImage ReconstructionImage Inverse Problems

    Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, 60607, USA

  18. Compact Low-Cost Hyperspectral Imaging via Angular-to-Spectral Diversity Conversion

    Sep 20, 2026Kazuma Fujiwara, Takuya Funatomi, Kazuya Kitano +2Hyperspectral ImagingComputational Imaging

    Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan · Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

  19. FlowSGS: Improving Flow Priors for Inverse Imaging with Stochastic Interpolants

    Sep 17, 2026Tianao Li, Xinhui Qian, Emma AlexanderFlow MatchingMarkov Chain Monte Carlo

    Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University · NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI) · Department of Statistics and Data Science, Northwestern University

  20. Learning-Based Reconstruction of Optical Properties in Bilayered Media from Single-distance Time-Resolved Reflectance Measurements

    Sep 17, 2026Caterina Amendola, Giulia Maffeis, Lorenzo Buffoni +8Inverse ProblemsImage Inverse Problems

    Department of Physics, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, 20133, Italy

  21. STAR: Structure-aware Test-time Adaptation for diffusion-based light field Reconstruction

    Sep 17, 2026Wontae Choi, Ki Ryum Moon, Jae Young Lee +2Diffusion Model AdaptationImage Reconstruction

    Department of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Suwon, South Korea · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, SKKU, Suwon, South Korea

  22. Backward SDEs-based Diffusion for Physics-Constrained Generation

    Sep 14, 2026Zihao WangDiffusion Model InversionConstrained Generative Modeling

  23. SONAR: A Structure-Consistent Neural Operator for Null-Space-Aware Sparse View CT Reconstruction

    Sep 12, 2026Song Ni, Haijun Yu, Haodong Li +4Sparse-View CT ReconstructionImage Inverse Problems

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854

  24. Tile-Based Phase Unwrapping with Reliability-Ordered Joining and Residual-Weighted Multipath Averaging

    Sep 11, 2026Antoine Moevus, Max MignotteImage Inverse ProblemsInverse Problems

    The authors are with the D´epartement d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada.

  25. FIRM: Flow-based Imaging via Regularized Minimization

    Sep 11, 2026Shirin Shoushtari, Edward P. Chandler, Xiao Shi +1Conditional Flow MatchingImage Reconstruction

    WashU · UW-Madison

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

    Sep 11, 2026Chen Min, Haowen Jiang, Zheng Ma +1Physics-Informed Diffusion ModelsSeismic Imaging

    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

  27. Diffusion Based Unpaired Data Learning for Inverse Problems

    Sep 1, 2026Chenglong Bao, Yiming Dang, Chenguang Duan +2Diffusion-Based Inverse ProblemsInverse Problems

    Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Department of Mathematical Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Institut für Geometrie und Praktische Mathematik, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany +2

  28. ReBridge-Flow: Re-Coupling Posterior Bridges in Flow Matching for Image Restoration

    Sep 1, 2026Jiaqi Zhang, Yiqi Wang, Hongjie Wu +6Image RestorationImage Inverse Problems

    Jiangsu University · Griffith University · Sichuan University +5

  29. FiLM-GPNet: Geometry-Aware Pseudo-Supervised Phase Restoration with Zero-Shot Generalization for Large Temporal InSAR Stacks

    Aug 29, 2026Getnet Demil, Muhammad Farhan Humayun, Tomi Westerlund +2Aleatoric UncertaintySynthetic Aperture Radar

    University of Turku Turku, Finland

  30. PAGS: Autofocusing Photoacoustic Tomography via Speed-of-Sound-Adaptive Gaussian Splatting

    Aug 26, 2026Jiarui Ge, Jintao Ma, Bangxu Fan +4Photoacoustic TomographyImage Reconstruction

    MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, Institute of AI, School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. · National Biomedical Imaging Center, College of Future Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China. · Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China. +2