Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems in the Exponential Family

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Micheli, Alessandro, Monod, Mélodie, Bhatt, Samir
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Micheli, Alessandro
Monod, Mélodie
Bhatt, Samir
author_facet Micheli, Alessandro
Monod, Mélodie
Bhatt, Samir
contents Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for solving inverse problems, yet prior work has primarily focused on observations with Gaussian measurement noise, restricting their use in real-world scenarios. This limitation persists due to the intractability of the likelihood score, which until now has only been approximated in the simpler case of Gaussian likelihoods. In this work, we extend diffusion models to handle inverse problems where the observations follow a distribution from the exponential family, such as a Poisson or a Binomial distribution. By leveraging the conjugacy properties of exponential family distributions, we introduce the evidence trick, a method that provides a tractable approximation to the likelihood score. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our methodology effectively performs Bayesian inference on spatially inhomogeneous Poisson processes with intensities as intricate as ImageNet images. Furthermore, we demonstrate the real-world impact of our methodology by showing that it performs competitively with the current state-of-the-art in predicting malaria prevalence estimates in Sub-Saharan Africa.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05994
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems in the Exponential Family
Micheli, Alessandro
Monod, Mélodie
Bhatt, Samir
Machine Learning
Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for solving inverse problems, yet prior work has primarily focused on observations with Gaussian measurement noise, restricting their use in real-world scenarios. This limitation persists due to the intractability of the likelihood score, which until now has only been approximated in the simpler case of Gaussian likelihoods. In this work, we extend diffusion models to handle inverse problems where the observations follow a distribution from the exponential family, such as a Poisson or a Binomial distribution. By leveraging the conjugacy properties of exponential family distributions, we introduce the evidence trick, a method that provides a tractable approximation to the likelihood score. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our methodology effectively performs Bayesian inference on spatially inhomogeneous Poisson processes with intensities as intricate as ImageNet images. Furthermore, we demonstrate the real-world impact of our methodology by showing that it performs competitively with the current state-of-the-art in predicting malaria prevalence estimates in Sub-Saharan Africa.
title Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems in the Exponential Family
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05994