Learning Informative Prior with Infinite-Dimensional Continuous Normalizing Flow for Bayesian Inverse Problem

Abstract: This paper addresses infinite-dimensional Bayesian inference for inverse problem of partial differential equations with model parameters in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. To effectively incorporate prior information, we propose a novel continuous normalizing flows based infinite-dimensional model. Specifically, by introducing a well-defined neural ordinary differential equation in infinite-dimensional space, a simple reference measure can be transformed into a more complex measure which encodes the prior information. A corresponding theoretical framework is established to ensure the well-posedness of our proposed Bayesian prior in infinite-dimensional space. We also provide training methods of the prior for two distinct data settings, along with two sampling algorithms for the resulting Bayesian posterior. The proposed framework is applied to three representative inverse problems: the simple smooth inverse problem, inverse scattering problem, and the inverse heat conduction problem. Numerical experiments support the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.