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Main Authors: Parikh, Meet Hemant, Chen, Yaqin, Wang, Jian-Xun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21469
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author Parikh, Meet Hemant
Chen, Yaqin
Wang, Jian-Xun
author_facet Parikh, Meet Hemant
Chen, Yaqin
Wang, Jian-Xun
contents Data assimilation and scientific inverse problems require reconstructing high-dimensional physical states from sparse and noisy observations, ideally with uncertainty-aware posterior samples that remain faithful to learned priors and governing physics. While training-free conditional generation is well developed for diffusion models, corresponding conditioning and posterior sampling strategies for Flow Matching (FM) priors remain comparatively under-explored, especially on scientific benchmarks where fidelity must be assessed beyond measurement misfit. In this work, we study training-free conditional generation for scientific inverse problems under FM priors and organize existing inference-time strategies by where measurement information is injected: (i) guided transport dynamics that perturb sampling trajectories using likelihood information, and (ii) source-distribution inference that performs posterior inference over the source variable while keeping the learned transport fixed. Building on the latter, we propose D-Flow SGLD, a source-space posterior sampling method that augments differentiable source inference with preconditioned stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics, enabling scalable exploration of the source posterior induced by new measurement operators without retraining the prior or modifying the learned FM dynamics. We benchmark representative methods from both families on a hierarchy of problems: 2D toy posteriors, chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky trajectories, and wall-bounded turbulence reconstruction. Across these settings, we quantify trade-offs among measurement assimilation, posterior diversity, and physics/statistics fidelity, and establish D-Flow SGLD as a practical FM-compatible posterior sampler for scientific inverse problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_21469
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle D-Flow SGLD: Source-Space Posterior Sampling for Scientific Inverse Problems with Flow Matching
Parikh, Meet Hemant
Chen, Yaqin
Wang, Jian-Xun
Machine Learning
Data assimilation and scientific inverse problems require reconstructing high-dimensional physical states from sparse and noisy observations, ideally with uncertainty-aware posterior samples that remain faithful to learned priors and governing physics. While training-free conditional generation is well developed for diffusion models, corresponding conditioning and posterior sampling strategies for Flow Matching (FM) priors remain comparatively under-explored, especially on scientific benchmarks where fidelity must be assessed beyond measurement misfit. In this work, we study training-free conditional generation for scientific inverse problems under FM priors and organize existing inference-time strategies by where measurement information is injected: (i) guided transport dynamics that perturb sampling trajectories using likelihood information, and (ii) source-distribution inference that performs posterior inference over the source variable while keeping the learned transport fixed. Building on the latter, we propose D-Flow SGLD, a source-space posterior sampling method that augments differentiable source inference with preconditioned stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics, enabling scalable exploration of the source posterior induced by new measurement operators without retraining the prior or modifying the learned FM dynamics. We benchmark representative methods from both families on a hierarchy of problems: 2D toy posteriors, chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky trajectories, and wall-bounded turbulence reconstruction. Across these settings, we quantify trade-offs among measurement assimilation, posterior diversity, and physics/statistics fidelity, and establish D-Flow SGLD as a practical FM-compatible posterior sampler for scientific inverse problems.
title D-Flow SGLD: Source-Space Posterior Sampling for Scientific Inverse Problems with Flow Matching
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21469