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.
Improving Decoupled Posterior Sampling for Inverse Problems using Data Consistency Constraint
ZJU-UIUC Institute（ZJU-UIUC联合学院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；School of Information Science and Technology（信息科学与技术学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute for Physics of Intelligence（智能物理研究所）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
In this work, we train conditional Wasserstein generative adversarial networks to effectively sample from the posterior of physics-based Bayesian inference problems. The generator is constructed using a U-Net architecture, with the latent information injected using conditional instance normalization. The former facilitates a multiscale inverse map, while the latter enables the decoupling of the latent space dimension from the dimension of the measurement, and introduces stochasticity at all scales of the U-Net. We solve PDE-based inverse problems to demonstrate the performance of our approach …
We consider Bayesian inference in inverse regression problems where the objective is to infer about unobserved covariates from observed responses and covariates. We establish posterior consistency of such unobserved covariates in Bayesian inverse regression problemsunder appropriate priors in a leave-one-out cross-validation setup. We relate this to posterior consistency of inverse reference distributions (Bhattacharya (2013)) for assessing model adequacy. We illustrate our theory and methods with various examples of Bayesian inverse regression, along with adequate simulation experiments.
Controlling Posterior Collapse by an Inverse Lipschitz Constraint on the Decoder Network
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Preferred Networks；The Institute of Statistical Mathematics（统计数学研究所）；National Institute of Informatics (NII)（信息学研究所（NII））；Preferred Networks, Inc.（Preferred Networks公司）
Beyond Accuracy: Evaluating Posterior Fidelity of Diffusion Inverse Solvers
Department of Statistics, University of Michigan（密歇根大学统计学系）；Department of EECS, University of Michigan（密歇根大学电子工程与计算机科学系）；Department of Statistics, Rutgers University（罗格斯大学统计学系）
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Université de Paris（巴黎大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris（巴黎天体物理研究所）；Flatiron Institute（弗莱提荣研究所）
High-dimensional probability density estimation for inference suffers from the "curse of dimensionality". For many physical inference problems, the full posterior distribution is unwieldy and seldom used in practice. Instead, we propose direct estimation of lower-dimensional marginal distributions, bypassing high-dimensional density estimation or high-dimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. By evaluating the two-dimensional marginal posteriors we can unveil the full-dimensional parameter covariance structure. We additionally propose constructing a simple hierarchy of fast neural …
Universidad de la República（共和国大学）；CNRS & Université de Paris（法国国家科学研究中心与巴黎大学）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）
In this paper we address the problem of solving ill-posed inverse problems in imaging where the prior is a neural generative model. Specifically we consider the decoupled case where the prior is trained once and can be reused for many different log-concave degradation models without retraining. Whereas previous MAP-based approaches to this problem lead to highly non-convex optimization algorithms, our approach computes the joint (space-latent) MAP that naturally leads to alternate optimization algorithms and to the use of a stochastic encoder to accelerate computations. The resulting technique…
We present a randomized maximum a posteriori (rMAP) method for generating approximate samples of posteriors in high dimensional Bayesian inverse problems governed by large-scale forward problems. We derive the rMAP approach by: 1) casting the problem of computing the MAP point as a stochastic optimization problem; 2) interchanging optimization and expectation; and 3) approximating the expectation with a Monte Carlo method. For a specific randomized data and prior mean, rMAP reduces to the maximum likelihood approach (RML). It can also be viewed as an iterative stochastic Newton method. An anal…
The Bayesian solution to a statistical inverse problem can be summarised by a mode of the posterior distribution, i.e. a MAP estimator. The MAP estimator essentially coincides with the (regularised) variational solution to the inverse problem, seen as minimisation of the Onsager-Machlup functional of the posterior measure. An open problem in the stability analysis of inverse problems is to establish a relationship between the convergence properties of solutions obtained by the variational approach and by the Bayesian approach. To address this problem, we propose a general convergence theory fo…
Duke University（杜克大学）；George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）
In this work, we adopt a general framework based on the Gibbs posterior to update belief distributions for inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). The Gibbs posterior formulation is a generalization of standard Bayesian inference that only relies on a loss function connecting the unknown parameters to the data. It is particularly useful when the true data generating mechanism (or noise distribution) is unknown or difficult to specify. The Gibbs posterior coincides with Bayesian updating when a true likelihood function is known and the loss function corresponds to th…
We consider a Bayesian nonparametric approach to a family of linear inverse problems in a separable Hilbert space setting with Gaussian noise. We assume Gaussian priors, which are conjugate to the model, and present a method of identifying the posterior using its precision operator. Working with the unbounded precision operator enables us to use partial differential equations (PDE) methodology to obtain rates of contraction of the posterior distribution to a Dirac measure centered on the true solution. Our methods assume a relatively weak relation between the prior covariance, noise covariance…
The Bayesian approach is effective for inverse problems. The posterior density distribution provides useful information of the unknowns. However, for problems with non-unique solutions, the classical estimators such as the maximum a posterior (MAP) and conditional mean (CM) are not enough. We introduce two new estimators, the local maximum a posterior (LMAP) and local conditional mean (LCM). Their applications are demonstrated by three inverse problems: an inverse spectral problem, an inverse source problem, and an inverse medium problem.
We consider a class of linear ill-posed inverse problems arising from inversion of a compact operator with singular values which decay exponentially to zero. We adopt a Bayesian approach, assuming a Gaussian prior on the unknown function. If the observational noise is assumed to be Gaussian then this prior is conjugate to the likelihood so that the posterior distribution is also Gaussian. We study Bayesian posterior consistency in the small observational noise limit. We assume that the forward operator and the prior and noise covariance operators commute with one another. We show how, for give…
In the Bayesian approach, the a priori knowledge about the input of a mathematical model is described via a probability measure. The joint distribution of the unknown input and the data is then conditioned, using Bayes' formula, giving rise to the posterior distribution on the unknown input. In this setting we prove posterior consistency for nonlinear inverse problems: a sequence of data is considered, with diminishing fluctuations around a single truth and it is then of interest to show that the resulting sequence of posterior measures arising from this sequence of data concentrates around th…
Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences（奥登计算工程与科学研究所）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
In recent years, the field of machine learning has made phenomenal progress in the pursuit of simulating real-world data generation processes. One notable example of such success is the variational autoencoder (VAE). In this work, with a small shift in perspective, we leverage and adapt VAEs for a different purpose: uncertainty quantification in scientific inverse problems. We introduce UQ-VAE: a flexible, adaptive, hybrid data/model-informed framework for training neural networks capable of rapid modelling of the posterior distribution representing the unknown parameter of interest. Specifica…
We consider the problem of recovering a function input of a differential equation formulated on an unknown domain $M$. We assume to have access to a discrete domain $M_n=\{x_1, \dots, x_n\} \subset M$, and to noisy measurements of the output solution at $p\le n$ of those points. We introduce a graph-based Bayesian inverse problem, and show that the graph-posterior measures over functions in $M_n$ converge, in the large $n$ limit, to a posterior over functions in $M$ that solves a Bayesian inverse problem with known domain. The proofs rely on the variational formulation of the Bayesian update, …
In this paper we propose a general method to derive an upper bound for the contraction rate of the posterior distribution for nonparametric inverse problems. We present a general theorem that allows us to derive con- traction rates for the parameter of interest from contraction rates of the related direct problem of estimating transformed parameter of interest. An interesting aspect of this approach is that it allows us to derive con- traction rates for priors that are not related to the singular value decomposition of the operator. We apply our result to several examples of linear inverse pro…
Bayesian posterior distributions arising in modern applications, including inverse problems in partial differential equation models in tomography and subsurface flow, are often computationally intractable due to the large computational cost of evaluating the data likelihood. To alleviate this problem, we consider using Gaussian process regression to build a surrogate model for the likelihood, resulting in an approximate posterior distribution that is amenable to computations in practice. This work serves as an introduction to Gaussian process regression, in particular in the context of buildin…
This paper focuses on Bayesian shrinkage for covariance matrix estimation. We examine posterior properties and frequentist risks of Bayesian estimators based on new hierarchical inverse-Wishart priors. More precisely, we give the existence conditions of the posterior distributions. Advantages in terms of numerical simulations of posteriors are shown. A simulation study illustrates the performance of the estimation procedures under three loss functions for relevant sample sizes and various covariance structures.
We generalize the results of \cite{Capistran2016} on expected Bayes factors (BF) to control the numerical error in the posterior distribution to an infinite dimensional setting when considering Banach functional spaces and now in a prior setting. The main result is a bound on the absolute global error to be tolerated by the Forward Map numerical solver, to keep the BF of the numerical vs. the theoretical model near to 1, now in this more general setting, possibly including a truncated, finite dimensional approximate prior measure. In so doing we found a far more general setting to define and p…
Benchmarking Diffusion Annealing-Based Bayesian Inverse Problem Solvers
Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin（奥登计算工程与科学研究所，德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Dept of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin（生物医学工程系，德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
The statistical inverse problem of estimating the probability distribution of an infinite-dimensional unknown given its noisy indirect observation is studied in the Bayesian framework. In practice, one often considers only finite-dimensional unknowns and investigates numerically their probabilities. As many unknowns are function-valued, it is of interest to know whether the estimated probabilities converge when the finite-dimensional approximations of the unknown are refined. In this work, the generalized Bayes formula is shown to be a powerful tool in the convergence studies. With the help of…
In the bayesian analysis of Inverse Problems most relevant cases the forward maps (FM, or regressor function) are defined in terms of a system of (O, P)DE's with intractable solutions. These necessarily involve a numerical method to find approximate versions of such solutions and lead to a numerical/approximate posterior distribution. Recently several results have been published on the regularity conditions required on such numerical methods to ensure converge of the numerical to the theoretical posterior. However, more practical guidelines are needed to ensure a suitable working numerical pos…
We present the Sequential Ensemble Transform (SET) method, an approach for generating approximate samples from a Bayesian posterior distribution. The method explores the posterior distribution by solving a sequence of discrete optimal transport problems to produce a series of transport plans which map prior samples to posterior samples. We prove that the sequence of Dirac mixture distributions produced by the SET method converges weakly to the true posterior as the sample size approaches infinity. Furthermore, our numerical results indicate that, when compared to standard Sequential Monte Carl…
We present an extensible software framework, hIPPYlib, for solution of large-scale deterministic and Bayesian inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) with infinite-dimensional parameter fields (which are high-dimensional after discretization). hIPPYlib overcomes the prohibitive nature of Bayesian inversion for this class of problems by implementing state-of-the-art scalable algorithms for PDE-based inverse problems that exploit the structure of the underlying operators, notably the Hessian of the log-posterior. The key property of the algorithms implemented in hIPPYl…
We propose a Bayesian inference framework to estimate uncertainties in inverse scattering problems. Given the observed data, the forward model and their uncertainties, we find the posterior distribution over a finite parameter field representing the objects. To construct the prior distribution we use a topological sensitivity analysis. We demonstrate the approach on the Bayesian solution of 2D inverse problems in light and acoustic holography with synthetic data. Statistical information on objects such as their center location, diameter size, orientation, as well as material properties, are ex…
Limitations of polynomial chaos expansions in the Bayesian solution of inverse problems
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；Department of Mathematics University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校数学系）；Department of Mathematics University of Kansas（堪萨斯大学数学系）
The statistical evidence (or marginal likelihood) is a key quantity in Bayesian statistics, allowing one to assess the probability of the data given the model under investigation. This paper focuses on refining the power posterior approach to improve estimation of the evidence. The power posterior method involves transitioning from the prior to the posterior by powering the likelihood by an inverse temperature. In common with other tempering algorithms, the power posterior involves some degree of tuning. The main contributions of this article are twofold -- we present a result from the numeric…
We investigate an empirical Bayesian nonparametric approach to a family of linear inverse problems with Gaussian prior and Gaussian noise. We consider a class of Gaussian prior probability measures with covariance operator indexed by a hyperparameter that quantifies regularity. By introducing two auxiliary problems, we construct an empirical Bayes method and prove that this method can automatically select the hyperparameter. In addition, we show that this adaptive Bayes procedure provides optimal contraction rates up to a slowly varying term and an arbitrarily small constant, without knowledge…
New sampling algorithms based on simulating continuous-time stochastic processes called piece-wise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) have shown considerable promise. However, these methods can struggle to sample from multi-modal or heavy-tailed distributions. We show how tempering ideas can improve the mixing of PDMPs in such cases. We introduce an extended distribution defined over the state of the posterior distribution and an inverse temperature, which interpolates between a tractable distribution when the inverse temperature is 0 and the posterior when the inverse temperature is 1. Th…
