ReGuidance: A Simple Diffusion Wrapper for Boosting Sample Quality on Hard Inverse Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Karan, Aayush, Shah, Kulin, Chen, Sitan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Karan, Aayush
Shah, Kulin
Chen, Sitan
author_facet Karan, Aayush
Shah, Kulin
Chen, Sitan
contents There has been a flurry of activity around using pretrained diffusion models as informed data priors for solving inverse problems, and more generally around steering these models using reward models. Training-free methods like diffusion posterior sampling (DPS) and its many variants have offered flexible heuristic algorithms for these tasks, but when the reward is not informative enough, e.g., in hard inverse problems with low signal-to-noise ratio, these techniques veer off the data manifold, failing to produce realistic outputs. In this work, we devise a simple wrapper, ReGuidance, for boosting both the sample realism and reward achieved by these methods. Given a candidate solution $\hat{x}$ produced by an algorithm of the user's choice, we propose inverting the solution by running the unconditional probability flow ODE in reverse starting from $\hat{x}$, and then using the resulting latent as an initialization for DPS. We evaluate our wrapper on hard inverse problems like large box in-painting and super-resolution with high upscaling. Whereas state-of-the-art baselines visibly fail, we find that applying our wrapper on top of these baselines significantly boosts sample quality and measurement consistency. We complement these findings with theory proving that on certain multimodal data distributions, ReGuidance simultaneously boosts the reward and brings the candidate solution closer to the data manifold. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first rigorous algorithmic guarantee for DPS.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10955
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ReGuidance: A Simple Diffusion Wrapper for Boosting Sample Quality on Hard Inverse Problems
Karan, Aayush
Shah, Kulin
Chen, Sitan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
There has been a flurry of activity around using pretrained diffusion models as informed data priors for solving inverse problems, and more generally around steering these models using reward models. Training-free methods like diffusion posterior sampling (DPS) and its many variants have offered flexible heuristic algorithms for these tasks, but when the reward is not informative enough, e.g., in hard inverse problems with low signal-to-noise ratio, these techniques veer off the data manifold, failing to produce realistic outputs. In this work, we devise a simple wrapper, ReGuidance, for boosting both the sample realism and reward achieved by these methods. Given a candidate solution $\hat{x}$ produced by an algorithm of the user's choice, we propose inverting the solution by running the unconditional probability flow ODE in reverse starting from $\hat{x}$, and then using the resulting latent as an initialization for DPS. We evaluate our wrapper on hard inverse problems like large box in-painting and super-resolution with high upscaling. Whereas state-of-the-art baselines visibly fail, we find that applying our wrapper on top of these baselines significantly boosts sample quality and measurement consistency. We complement these findings with theory proving that on certain multimodal data distributions, ReGuidance simultaneously boosts the reward and brings the candidate solution closer to the data manifold. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first rigorous algorithmic guarantee for DPS.
title ReGuidance: A Simple Diffusion Wrapper for Boosting Sample Quality on Hard Inverse Problems
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10955