← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2610.02377 · v2
Flow Matching for Fast Posterior Sampling in Bayesian Inverse Problems
首次提交 2026-10-02 02:58
版本更新 2026-10-29 19:42
雷达观测 2026-10-30 13:28
摘要
Sampling from the posterior is the central task of computational Bayesian inverse problems. The standard workhorse in Bayesian inference---Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)---is sequential, yields correlated samples, and must be rerun for each new observation. Conditional flow matching offers an amortized alternative: a transport map, trained once on joint samples of parameter and data, that yields independent approximate posterior samples for any observation at negligible online cost, without new likelihood evaluations. We give a careful, MCMC-literate assessment of flow matching for PDE-based inverse problems with function-valued parameters. Exploiting the flow's tractable density, we derive computable accuracy estimates for the learned posterior in total variation distance and Kullback--Leibler divergence and, moreover, propose a hybrid sampler that is made asymptotically exact by Metropolization. We validate the accuracy estimates and demonstrate amortization in several numerical examples, including electrical impedance tomography and a likelihood-free Lotka--Volterra model. Flow matching reproduces posterior means and credible bands closely at a fraction of the forward solves required by MCMC, but its accuracy degrades for concentrated posteriors and for observations that are atypical under the prior.
作者备注：38 pages, 18 figures
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v2 · 2026-10-29 19:42 · 最新观测版本
Flow Matching for Fast Posterior Sampling in Bayesian Inverse Problems
Sampling from the posterior is the central task of computational Bayesian inverse problems. The standard workhorse in Bayesian inference---Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)---is sequential, yields correlated samples, and must be rerun for each new observation. Conditional flow matching offers an amortized alternative: a transport map, trained once on joint samples of parameter and data, that yields independent approximate posterior samples for any observation at negligible online cost, without new likelihood evaluations. We give a careful, MCMC-literate assessment of flow matching for PDE-based inverse problems with function-valued parameters. Exploiting the flow's tractable density, we derive computable accuracy estimates for the learned posterior in total variation distance and Kullback--Leibler divergence and, moreover, propose a hybrid sampler that is made asymptotically exact by Metropolization. We validate the accuracy estimates and demonstrate amortization in several numerical examples, including electrical impedance tomography and a likelihood-free Lotka--Volterra model. Flow matching reproduces posterior means and credible bands closely at a fraction of the forward solves required by MCMC, but its accuracy degrades for concentrated posteriors and for observations that are atypical under the prior.
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