arXiv Machine Learning

Convergent Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Annealed Noise Levels

The paper presents convergence guarantees for Plug-and-Play (PnP) image restoration algorithms that use annealed noise levels, covering both deterministic and stochastic methods. It identifies explicit nonconvex objectives linked to the final denoising level and proves that iterates become asymptotically stationary with respect to these objectives, without requiring a specific noise decay schedule. The authors validate their theory experimentally on tasks such as inpainting, super‑resolution, demosaicing, and tomography.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Plug-and-Play Diffusion Meets ADMM: Dual-Variable Coupling for Robust Medical Image Reconstruction

arXiv:2602. 23214v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Plug-and-Play diffusion prior (PnPDP) frameworks have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving imaging inverse problems by treating pretrained generative models as modular priors.

By Chenhe Du, Xuanyu Tian, Qing Wu, Muyu Liu, Jingyi Yu, Hongjiang Wei, Yuyao Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 4

A Posterior-Dynamics Framework for Imaging Inverse Problems with Pretrained Diffusion Priors

The paper introduces a Posterior‑Dynamics Framework that leverages pretrained diffusion models as multiscale priors for linear imaging inverse problems such as deblurring, super‑resolution, and inpainting. By constructing a surrogate likelihood centered on the clean image and incorporating diffusion uncertainty, the authors derive continuous posterior dynamics and a tunable Langevin component for adaptive exploration. They prove theoretical guarantees (endpoint consistency, finite‑horizon tracking, weak accuracy) and present the PD‑IMEX sampler, which achieves high‑quality reconstructions with only 100 score evaluations and controllable fidelity‑diversity trade‑offs.

By Zhaoqiang Liu, Tongyao Pang, Ruibing Wang, Yang Zheng
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

FlowSGS: Improving Flow Matching Priors for Inverse Imaging with Stochastic Interpolants

FlowSGS introduces a flow-based posterior sampling method that combines Split Gibbs Sampling (SGS) with Langevin dynamics for the likelihood step and Stochastic Interpolants (SI) for the prior step. By integrating a pretrained flow model into the prior step via SI's reverse-time SDE and a novel timestep correction, FlowSGS reduces the number of network evaluations compared to plug‑and‑play diffusion samplers. Experiments demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art performance on various inverse problems, including the first flow‑based solution to a nonlinear inverse problem (Fourier phase retrieval).

By Tianao Li, Xinhui Qian, Emma Alexander