Consistency Posterior Sampling for Diverse Image Synthesis

Abstract

Posterior sampling in high-dimensional spaces using generative models holds significant promise for various applications, including but not limited to inverse problems and guided generation tasks. Generating diverse posterior samples remains expensive, as existing methods require restarting the entire generative process for each new sample. In this work, we propose a posterior sampling approach that simulates Langevin dynamics in the noise space of a pre-trained generative model. By exploiting the mapping between the noise and data spaces which can be provided by distilled flows or consistency models, our method enables seamless exploration of the posterior without the need to re-run the full sampling chain, drastically reducing computational overhead. Theoretically, we prove a guarantee for the proposed noise-space Langevin dynamics to approximate the posterior, assuming that the generative model sufficiently approximates the prior distribution. Our framework is experimentally validated on image restoration tasks involving noisy linear and nonlinear forward operators applied to LSUN-Bedroom (256 × 256) and ImageNet (64 × 64) datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach generates high-fidelity samples with enhanced semantic diversity even under a limited number of function evaluations, offering superior efficiency and performance compared to existing diffusion-based posterior sampling techniques.