InvFusion: Bridging Supervised and Zero-shot Diffusion for Inverse Problems

Noam Elata, Hyungjin Chung, Jong Chul Ye, Tomer Michaeli, Michael Elad

Keywords: Image Restoration, Inverse-Problem Solving, Diffusion Models

Abstract: Diffusion Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling inverse problems, offering high-quality posterior-sampling-based solutions. Despite significant advances, a fundamental trade-off persists regarding the way the conditioned synthesis is employed: Zero-shot approaches can accommodate any linear degradation but rely on approximations that reduce accuracy. In contrast, training-based methods model the posterior correctly, but cannot adapt to the degradation at test-time. Here we introduce InvFusion, the first training-based degradation-aware posterior sampler. InvFusion combines the best of both worlds - the strong performance of supervised approaches and the flexibility of zero-shot methods. This is achieved through a novel architectural design that seamlessly integrates the degradation operator directly into the diffusion denoiser. We compare InvFusion against existing general-purpose posterior samplers, both degradation-aware zero-shot techniques and blind training-based methods. Experiments on the FFHQ and ImageNet datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Beyond posterior sampling, we further demonstrate the applicability of our architecture, operating as a general Minimum Mean Square Error predictor, and as a Neural Posterior Principal Component estimator.

Primary Area: Deep learning (e.g., architectures, generative models, optimization for deep networks, foundation models, LLMs)

Submission Number: 26812