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Density reconstruction from X-ray projections is an important problem in radiography with key applications in scientific and industrial X-ray computed tomography (CT). Often, such projections are corrupted by unknown sources of noise and scatter, which when not properly accounted for, can lead to significant errors in density reconstruction. In the setting of this problem, recent deep learning-based methods have shown promise in improving the accuracy of density reconstruction. In this article, we propose a deep learning-based encoder-decoder framework wherein the encoder extracts robust features from noisy/corrupted X-ray projections and the decoder reconstructs the density field from the features extracted by the encoder. We explore three options for the latent-space representation of features: physics-inspired supervision, self-supervision, and no supervision. We find that variants based on self-supervised and physicsinspired supervised features perform better over a range of unknown scatter and noise. In extreme noise settings, the variant with self-supervised features performs best. After investigating further details of the proposed deep-learning methods, we conclude by demonstrating that the newly proposed methods are able to achieve higher accuracy in density reconstruction when compared to a traditional iterative technique.

A trained attention-based transformer network can robustly recover the complex topologies given by the Richtmyer-Meshkoff instability from a sequence of hydrodynamic features derived from radiographic images corrupted with blur, scatter, and noise. This approach is demonstrated on ICF-like double shell hydrodynamic simulations. The key component of this network is a transformer encoder that acts on a sequence of features extracted from noisy radiographs. This encoder includes numerous self-attention layers that act to learn temporal dependencies in the input sequences and increase the expressiveness of the model. This approach is demonstrated to exhibit an excellent ability to accurately recover the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability growth rates, even despite the gas-metal interface being greatly obscured by radiographic noise.

Since model bias and associated initialization shock are serious shortcomings that reduce prediction skills in state-of-the-art decadal climate prediction efforts, we pursue a complementary machine-learning-based approach to climate prediction. The example problem setting we consider consists of predicting natural variability of the North Atlantic sea surface temperature on the interannual timescale in the pre-industrial control simulation of the Community Earth System Model (CESM2). While previous works have considered the use of recurrent networks such as convolutional LSTMs and reservoir computing networks in this and other similar problem settings, we currently focus on the use of feedforward convolutional networks. In particular, we find that a feedforward convolutional network with a Densenet architecture is able to outperform a convolutional LSTM in terms of predictive skill. Next, we go on to consider a probabilistic formulation of the same network based on Stein variational gradient descent and find that in addition to providing useful measures of predictive uncertainty, the probabilistic (Bayesian) version improves on its deterministic counterpart in terms of predictive skill. Finally, we characterize the reliability of the ensemble of ML models obtained in the probabilistic setting by using analysis tools developed in the context of ensemble numerical weather prediction., Comment: 32 pages, 12 figures

In this paper we demonstrate that reservoir computing can be used to learn the dynamics of the shallow-water equations. In particular, while most previous applications of reservoir computing have required training on a particular trajectory to further predict the evolution along that trajectory alone, we show the capability of reservoir computing to predict trajectories of the shallow-water equations with initial conditions not seen in the training process. However, in this setting, we find that the performance of the network deteriorates for initial conditions with ambient conditions (such as total water height and average velocity) that are different from those in the training dataset. To circumvent this deficiency, we introduce a transfer learning approach wherein a small additional training step with the relevant ambient conditions is used to improve the predictions.

Radiography is often used to probe complex, evolving density fields in dynamic systems and in so doing gain insight into the underlying physics. This technique has been used in numerous fields including materials science, shock physics, inertial confinement fusion, and other national security applications. In many of these applications, however, complications resulting from noise, scatter, complex beam dynamics, etc. prevent the reconstruction of density from being accurate enough to identify the underlying physics with sufficient confidence. As such, density reconstruction from static/dynamic radiography has typically been limited to identifying discontinuous features such as cracks and voids in a number of these applications. In this work, we propose a fundamentally new approach to reconstructing density from a temporal sequence of radiographic images. Using only the robust features identifiable in radiographs, we combine them with the underlying hydrodynamic equations of motion using a machine learning approach, namely, conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN), to determine the density fields from a dynamic sequence of radiographs. Next, we seek to further enhance the hydrodynamic consistency of the ML-based density reconstruction through a process of parameter estimation and projection onto a hydrodynamic manifold. In this context, we note that the distance from the hydrodynamic manifold given by the training data to the test data in the parameter space considered both serves as a diagnostic of the robustness of the predictions and serves to augment the training database, with the expectation that the latter will further reduce future density reconstruction errors. Finally, we demonstrate the ability of this method to outperform a traditional radiographic reconstruction in capturing allowable hydrodynamic paths even when relatively small amounts of scatter are present., Comment: Submitted to Optics Express