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Abstract - What Do Flow-Based Inverse Solvers Approximate? A Posterior-Transport View
A growing family of training-free solvers -- FlowDPS, FLOWER, PnP-Flow and their diffusion ancestors (DPS, DAPS) -- repurpose a pretrained flow-matching prior to solve imaging inverse problems by adding a measurement-guidance term to the deterministic probability-flow ODE. Despite strong empirical results, what these per-step corrections actually approximate -- and how far the resulting samples are from the true posterior $p(x\mid y)$ -- has not been characterized. We give a posterior-transport account of flow-based inverse problem solving. Our starting point is a simple but consequential fact: for a \emph{deterministic} flow prior, Bayesian conditioning is realized entirely by a \emph{reweighting of the source distribution}, not by a drift correction; pushing the reweighted source through the \emph{unmodified} velocity field yields exact posterior samples. From this we show that trajectory-guidance solvers can be read as the minimum-kinetic-energy \emph{correction} field needed to morph the unconditional source into the posterior, and that FlowDPS / FLOWER / PnP-Flow correspond to distinct zeroth-order / Gaussian / proximal approximations of this single object; we bound the resulting posterior bias in Wasserstein distance. A controlled $2$D study with a closed-form posterior confirms the theory decisively: source reweighting matches the true posterior to the Monte-Carlo floor on every metric, whereas trajectory guidance incurs $200$--$800\times$ larger error and collapses posterior modes, \emph{regardless of guidance strength}. Guided by the analysis we propose a cheap, principled velocity-correction solver that is competitive across two in-domain priors (AFHQ, CelebA) and two out-of-distribution settings while, unlike point-estimate source-space optimizers, producing diverse posterior samples with uncertainty that correlates with reconstruction error.
基于流的逆求解器在近似什么?一种后验传输视角 /
What Do Flow-Based Inverse Solvers Approximate? A Posterior-Transport View
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文揭示了当前流行的基于流模型的逆问题求解方法(如FlowDPS、FLOWER等)实际上是在近似一种“源分布重加权”操作,通过将无条件生成模型的输入分布进行贝叶斯后验重加权,再用原生成器即可得到精确后验样本;而现有方法试图修正生成路径中的每一步,反而导致数百倍的后验误差和模式丢失,作者据此提出了一种更高效且能生成多样化样本的速度修正求解器。