Spanning Diffusion and Flow-based Posterior Sampling via Exact Gaussian Conditioning

Abstract

Flow-matching and diffusion models are increasingly used as priors for linear inverse problems, however, most methods are bespoke to one class of trajectory prior. Plug-and-play methods have been proposed, however these implicitly decorrelate the guided trajectory, resulting in broad priors that can struggle when data is sparse. This work proposes $\beta$-Flow: a general plug-and-play method indexed by a correlation parameter $\beta$ that generalises over flow, diffusion, and decorrelated priors, and a confidence parameter $\kappa$ that controls how strongly the path distribution is enforced. Each step requires only one forward evaluation of a denoising network, followed by a Gaussian conditioning step. This step is an exact Kalman update that is not dependent on network gradients. We show that many existing guided samplers can be interpreted as instances or approximations of our method, each implicitly using a different trajectory prior and operator in place of the Kalman gain. From this viewpoint, we provide a qualitative comparison of methods in terms of their implicit biases and assumptions. We demonstrate consistently state-of-the-art level performance across 7 inverse problems over 4 datasets in terms of PSNR and SSIM. Moreover, we demonstrate the utility of this prior control, by showing that confident high correlations (strict priors) work best when observations are less informative, while low correlation is preferred when observations are more informative, reflecting the complementary roles of the prior and likelihood in Bayesian inference.