InverseBench: Benchmarking Plug-and-Play Diffusion Priors for Inverse Problems in Physical Sciences
Hongkai Zheng Wenda Chu Bingliang Zhang Zihui Wu Austin Wang Berthy Feng Caifeng Zou Yu Sun Nikola Borislavov Kovachki Zachary E Ross Katherine Bouman Yisong Yue
Plug-and-play diffusion priors (PnPDP) have emerged as a promising research direction for solving inverse problems. 
 However, current studies primarily focus on natural image restoration, leaving the performance of these algorithms in scientific inverse problems largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce \textsc{InverseBench}, a framework that evaluates diffusion models across five distinct scientific inverse problems. These problems present unique structural challenges that differ from existing benchmarks, arising from critical scientific applications such as optical tomography, medical imaging, black hole imaging, seismology, and fluid dynamics. With \textsc{InverseBench}, we benchmark 14 inverse problem algorithms that use plug-and-play diffusion priors against strong, domain-specific baselines, offering valuable new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of existing algorithms. To facilitate further research and development, we open-source the codebase, along with datasets and pre-trained models, at  [https://devzhk.github.io/InverseBench/](https://devzhk.github.io/InverseBench/).
inverse problem, benchmark, diffusion model