BridgeTwist: Twisting Schr\"odinger Bridges for Training-Free Conditional Sampling

Abstract

Generative models are often required to serve many downstream conditional tasks. In the training-free setting, a pretrained unconditional model is reused as a prior and combined with a task-specific likelihood to sample from the corresponding posterior. While such training-free samplers have been developed for diffusion and flow models, their counterpart for Schr\"odinger bridge (SB) models remains unexplored, despite the growing appeal of SBs as flexible stochastic transport models between general source and target distributions. We propose BridgeTwist, a training-free conditional sampler for pretrained SB generative models, formulated as a tempered twisted sequential Monte Carlo scheme. Its twist is a closed-form plug-in surrogate, obtained by combining the velocity and score fields exposed by SB pretraining into an endpoint predictor and evaluating the likelihood there. Since this surrogate is less reliable near the source, we temper the twist with a time-varying exponent, downweighting its influence at early steps. We further introduce a bridge-shaped inference-time diffusion schedule that concentrates the proposal noise in the interior of the path. Telescoping importance weights then cancel all intermediate twist factors, yielding an asymptotically exact sampler for the posterior. Empirically, BridgeTwist outperforms training-free baselines on class-conditional and text-prompted image generation, and is competitive with specialized inverse problem solvers on inpainting, deblurring, and super-resolution.