Score-based diffusion models, a recent framework for posterior sampling in Bayesian inverse problems, are applied to diffuse optical tomography (DOT), a highly ill‑posed boundary value problem for recovering tissue absorption and scattering. The authors introduce a mixed score that combines a learned component with a model‑based component, providing a theoretical justification for its local approximation to the true score in the small diffusion‑time regime. Four difference‑imaging approaches are compared—classical model‑based, approximate diffusion, exact posterior sampling (UCoS), and a regularized UCoS—showing that UCoS yields more accurate reconstructions, especially under limited‑view geometry and real experimental data.
By Fabian Schneider, Meghdoot Mozumder, Konstantin Tamarov, Leila Taghizadeh, Tanja Tarvainen, Tapio Helin, Duc-Lam Duong
PosteriorBench is a new benchmark that evaluates how well generative inverse solvers recover full posterior distributions rather than just a single reconstruction. It tests four physics-based inverse problems—Darcy flow inversion, Poisson source recovery, carbon capture and storage, and light transport material inference—using high-fidelity reference posteriors generated by rejection sampling and MCMC. The benchmark employs five metrics (posterior-mean error, posterior-standard-deviation error, maximum mean discrepancy, sliced Wasserstein distance, and radially averaged power-spectrum error) to assess pointwise accuracy, uncertainty, distributional alignment, and global frequency fidelity, revealing significant distribution-matching gaps in current solvers and highlighting the importance of neural operators, guidance weights, and generation noise for posterior-variance calibration.
By Jiachen Yao, Zi-Siang Hsu, Xi Deng, Aditi Gupta, Xin Ju, Sally M Benson, Gege Wen, Anima Anandkumar
The paper introduces Scalable Bayesian Optimization of Composite Functions (SBOCF) for efficiently estimating physical parameters from scientific images, specifically targeting electron microscopy PACBED patterns. SBOCF leverages the composite structure of the image-matching objective, reducing modeled outputs from 24,649 to 11 by using patch-level summaries and correction terms. With only 50 simulator evaluations, SBOCF outperformed standard Bayesian optimization, achieving up to 290× lower median SSE on synthetic SrTiO3 benchmarks and producing accurate parameter estimates on experimental data without task-specific pretraining.
By Dasol Yoon, Poompol Buathong, Chia-Hao Lee, Yujia Zhang, David A. Muller, Peter I. Frazier
arXiv:2608. 09382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electromagnetic inverse scattering is a nonlinear and ill-posed problem, where accurate reconstruction is challenging due to measurement limitations, noise, and high computational costs, especially for 3-D imaging.
By Yutong Du, Zicheng Liu, Bo Qi, Yali Zong, Peixian Han
arXiv:2508. 05321v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Assume you encounter an inverse problem that shall be solved for a large number of data, but no ground-truth data is available.
By Laura Hellwege, Johann Christopher Engster, Moritz Schaar, Thorsten M. Buzug, Maik Stille
arXiv:2607. 19333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion-based methods have achieved remarkable empirical success in solving inverse problems.
By Yuchen Jiao, Na Li, Changxiao Cai, Yuxin Chen, Gen Li