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 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Inpainting | FFHQ (test) | LPIPS0.23 | 73 | |
| Super-Resolution | FFHQ (test) | SSIM42.3 | 32 | |
| Super-Resolution | CelebA (test) | PSNR33.09 | 30 | |
| Denoising | AFHQ Cat (test) | PSNR32.35 | 30 | |
| Super-Resolution | AFHQ Cat (test) | LPIPS0.249 | 26 | |
| Image Deblurring | CelebA (test) | PSNR35.67 | 25 | |
| Random Inpainting | AFHQ Cat (test) | PSNR33.7 | 24 | |
| Super-Resolution | FFHQ 1k | FID49.55 | 23 | |
| Box Inpainting | AFHQ Cat (test) | PSNR26.88 | 20 | |
| Inpainting | DIV2K 0.8k | PSNR28.81 | 14 |