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Preconditioned One-Step Generative Modeling for Bayesian Inverse Problems in Function Spaces

Machine Learning 2026-03-17 v1 Machine Learning Numerical Analysis Numerical Analysis

Abstract

We propose a machine-learning algorithm for Bayesian inverse problems in the function-space regime based on one-step generative transport. Building on the Mean Flows, we learn a fully conditional amortized sampler with a neural-operator backbone that maps a reference Gaussian noise to approximate posterior samples. We show that while white-noise references may be admissible at fixed discretization, they become incompatible with the function-space limit, leading to instability in inference for Bayesian problems arising from PDEs. To address this issue, we adopt a prior-aligned anisotropic Gaussian reference distribution and establish the Lipschitz regularity of the resulting transport. Our method is not distilled from MCMC: training relies only on prior samples and simulated partial and noisy observations. Once trained, it generates a 64×6464\times64 posterior sample in 103\sim 10^{-3}s, avoiding the repeated PDE solves of MCMC while matching key posterior summaries.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.14798,
  title  = {Preconditioned One-Step Generative Modeling for Bayesian Inverse Problems in Function Spaces},
  author = {Zilan Cheng and Li-Lian Wang and Zhongjian Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.14798},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:21:25.692Z