Backward SDEs-based Diffusion for Physics-Constrained Generation

Abstract

Pretrained score-based diffusion models provide strong unconditional priors, yet enforcing measurement or physics consistency in inverse problems is often handled by heuristic guidance, intermittent projections, or task-specific conditional training, with limited guarantees of feasibility at the end of inference. We propose terminal-conditioned inversion for score-based SDE priors. Given a frozen Score-SDE prior and a task-defined terminal feasibility specification, we construct an associated backward stochastic differential equation whose adapted solution defines a principled inverse map from the terminal requirement to a prior state at a chosen noise level. Under standard regularity conditions, we establish existence and uniqueness of the adapted solution and obtain terminal consistency by construction. We further develop a practical neural BSDE solver that composes arbitrary pretrained diffusion priors with domain constraints without modifying the score-defined coefficients, producing an anchored prior state that enables neighborhood sampling for uncertainty characterization. Experiments on toy datasets validate stable terminal-conditioned inversion and distributionally consistent neighborhood sampling. As a real-world case study, we apply the framework to sparse-view CT reconstruction and achieve improved reconstruction quality over representative training-free baselines while satisfying strict measurement feasibility under the prescribed terminal specification. Project is available in: \href{https://laplacelab.github.io/BSDEDiffusion/}{https://laplace.center/icmlbsdeI/}