Reconstructing Multi-Scale Physical Fields from Extremely Sparse Measurements with an Autoencoder-Diffusion Cascade

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical probabilistic autoencoder-diffusion cascade approach for reconstructing multi-scale physical fields from extremely sparse measurements, explicitly modeling uncertainty and improving stability.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cascaded inference framework with an explicit intermediate representation and mask-cascade training, addressing ill-posedness in sparse physical field reconstruction.

Findings

Accurate reconstructions from highly sparse data.

Robustness to diverse sensing patterns.

Enhanced stability compared to traditional methods.

Abstract

Reconstructing full fields from extremely sparse and random measurements constitutes a fundamentally ill-posed inverse problem, in which deterministic end-to-end mappings often break down due to intrinsic non-uniqueness and uncertainty. Rather than treating sparse reconstruction as a regression task, we recast it as a hierarchical probabilistic inference problem, where uncertainty is explicitly represented, structured, and progressively resolved. From this perspective, we propose Cascaded Sensing (Cas-Sensing) as a general reconstruction paradigm for multi-scale physical fields under extreme data sparsity. Central to this paradigm is the introduction of an explicit intermediate representation that decomposes the original ill-posed problem into two substantially better-conditioned subproblems. First, a lightweight neural-operator-based functional autoencoder infers a coarse-scale approximation of the target field from sparse observations acting as an explicit intermediate variable. Rather than modeling multiple scales jointly, this intermediate estimate is deterministically fixed and subsequently used as the sole conditioning input to a conditional diffusion model that generates refined-scale details, yielding a cascaded inference structure with clearly separated reconstruction responsibilities. To ensure robustness under diverse sensing patterns, the diffusion model is trained using a mask-cascade strategy, which exposes it to a distribution of imperfect conditioning structures induced by extreme sparsity. During inference, measurement consistency is enforced through manifold-constrained gradients within a Bayesian posterior framework, ensuring fidelity to sparse observations while preserving data manifold coherence. This cascaded probabilistic formulation substantially alleviates ill-posedness, enabling accurate and stable reconstructions even under extreme sparsity.