Flower: A Flow-Matching Solver for Inverse Problems
About
We introduce Flower, a solver for linear inverse problems. It leverages a pre-trained flow model to produce reconstructions that are consistent with the observed measurements. Flower operates through an iterative procedure over three steps: (i) a flow-consistent destination estimation, where the velocity network predicts a denoised target; (ii) a refinement step that projects the estimated destination onto a feasible set defined by the forward operator; and (iii) a time-progression step that re-projects the refined destination along the flow trajectory. We provide a theoretical analysis that demonstrates how Flower approximates Bayesian posterior sampling, thereby unifying perspectives from plug-and-play methods and generative inverse solvers. On the practical side, Flower achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality while using nearly identical hyperparameters across various linear inverse problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/mehrsapo/Flower.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inpainting | DIV2K 0.8k | PSNR28.81 | 14 | |
| Inpainting | FFHQ 1k | PSNR31.37 | 14 | |
| Deblurring | AFHQ-Cat 100 images (test) | PSNR28.97 | 10 | |
| Deblurring | CelebA 100 images (test) | PSNR35.67 | 10 | |
| Denoising | CelebA 100 images (test) | PSNR33.14 | 10 | |
| Super-Resolution | CelebA 100 images (test) | PSNR33.09 | 10 | |
| Denoising | AFHQ-Cat 100 images (test) | PSNR32.35 | 10 | |
| Random Inpainting | AFHQ-Cat 100 images (test) | PSNR33.7 | 10 | |
| Random Inpainting | CelebA 100 images (test) | PSNR33.95 | 10 | |
| Super-Resolution | AFHQ-Cat 100 images (test) | PSNR26.57 | 10 |