# Active Diffusion-Based Inference for Ill-Posed Inverse Problems under Incomplete Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27080 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27080/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14687/) (2022)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)
- [Do Deep Generative Models Know What They Don't Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09136/) (2018)
- [Analyzing Inverse Problems with Invertible Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04730/) (2018)
- [Solving ill-posed inverse problems using iterative deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04058/) (2017)
- [NETT: Solving Inverse Problems with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00092/) (2018)
- [Single-Pass PCA of Large High-Dimensional Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07669/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many scientific and engineering applications require estimating unknown parameters from experimentally observable data -- an inverse problem that is inherently challenging due to nonlinearity, noise, and ill-posedness. In this paper, we propose an active diffusion-based inverse problem solver. A DM is trained to learn the mapping between the parameter space and the observable space. By iteratively detecting and correcting model misspecification through posterior uncertainty, the method discovers and learns the correct region of parameter space, even when initial training bounds exclude the true parameters. This provides a principled, Bayesian justification for adaptive domain augmentation and ensures robust inference for inverse problems under incomplete prior knowledge. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our inverse solver for a toy inverse problem with infinite solutions, and for the parameterization of the quantum correlation functions to event observables in a Quantum Chromodynamics analysis of nucleon structure.