Sep 17, 2026 · cs.CVJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Tianao Li, Xinhui Qian, Emma Alexander
Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University · NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI) · Department of Statistics and Data Science, Northwestern University
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.