Diffusion models can generate a variety of high-quality images by modeling complex data distributions. Trained diffusion models can also be very effective image priors for solving inverse problems. Most of the existing diffusion-based methods integrate data consistency steps within the diffusion reverse sampling process. The data consistency steps rely on an approximate likelihood function. In this paper, we show that the existing approximations are either insufficient or computationally inefficient. To address these issues, we propose a unified likelihood approximation method that incorporates a covariance correction term to enhance the performance and avoids propagating gradients through the diffusion model. The correction term, when integrated into the reverse diffusion sampling process, achieves better convergence towards the true data posterior for selected distributions and improves performance on real-world natural image datasets. Furthermore, we present an efficient way to factorize and invert the covariance matrix of the likelihood function for several inverse problems. We present comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over several existing approaches.
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