# Bayesian Inference with Generative Adversarial Network Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.09987 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09987/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14951/) (2021)
- [Solving Inverse Problems via Diffusion-Based Priors: An Approximation-Free Ensemble Sampling Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03979/) (2025)
- [Bayesian Inversion for Nonlinear Imaging Models using Deep Generative Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10078/) (2022)
- [Solving High-dimensional Inverse Problems Using Amortized Likelihood-free Inference with Noisy and Incomplete Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04565/) (2024)
- [Multi-fidelity Hamiltonian Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05033/) (2024)
- [Posterior sampling by source-space MCMC via prior-based few-step transport maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01034/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bayesian inference is used extensively to infer and to quantify the uncertainty in a field of interest from a measurement of a related field when the two are linked by a physical model. Despite its many applications, Bayesian inference faces challenges when inferring fields that have discrete representations of large dimension, and/or have prior distributions that are difficult to represent mathematically. In this manuscript we consider the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in addressing these challenges. A GAN is a type of deep neural network equipped with the ability to learn the distribution implied by multiple samples of a given field. Once trained on these samples, the generator component of a GAN maps the iid components of a low-dimensional latent vector to an approximation of the distribution of the field of interest. In this work we demonstrate how this approximate distribution may be used as a prior in a Bayesian update, and how it addresses the challenges associated with characterizing complex prior distributions and the large dimension of the inferred field. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach by applying it to the problem of inferring and quantifying uncertainty in the initial temperature field in a heat conduction problem from a noisy measurement of the temperature at later time.