Repulsive Latent Score Distillation for Solving Inverse Problems

Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) has been pivotal for leveraging pre-trained diffusion models in downstream tasks such as inverse problems, but it faces two major challenges: (i) mode collapse and (ii) latent space inversion, which become more pronounced in high-dimensional data. To address mode collapse, we introduce a novel variational framework for posterior sampling. Utilizing the Wasserstein gradient flow interpretation of SDS, we propose a multimodal variational approximation with a repulsion mechanism that promotes diversity among particles by penalizing pairwise kernel-based similarity. This repulsion acts as a simple regularizer, encouraging a more diverse set of solutions. To mitigate latent space ambiguity, we extend this framework with an augmented variational distribution that disentangles the latent and data. This repulsive augmented formulation balances computational efficiency, quality, and diversity. Extensive experiments on linear and nonlinear inverse tasks with high-resolution images (512 × 512) using pre-trained Stable Diffusion models demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at GitHub.