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Abstract - 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.
物理约束生成的正确度量:针对后验一致的偏微分方程逆问题的共面积校正 /
The Right Measure for Physics-Constrained Generation: A Co-Area Correction for Posterior-Consistent PDE Inverse Problems
1️⃣ 一句话总结
该论文指出,在利用生成模型(如扩散模型)求解偏微分方程逆问题时,常见的通过投影或引导强制满足物理约束的方法会导致后验分布采样错误,并揭示其根本原因是忽略了共面积雅可比因子;作者由此提出一种名为CoCoS的修正采样方法,能够精确恢复正确的后验分布,从而弥补了当前方法在不确定性量化上的系统性偏差。