A central premise of autonomous scientific imaging is that smarter navigation, whether Bayesian, RL-based, or otherwise adaptive, is the principal lever for sample-efficient acquisition. We present evidence to the contrary in scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), an atomic-resolution imaging modality whose every measurement deposits damaging electron dose.
The paper introduces Scalable Bayesian Optimization of Composite Functions (SBOCF) for efficiently estimating physical parameters from scientific images, specifically targeting electron microscopy PACBED patterns. SBOCF leverages the composite structure of the image-matching objective, reducing modeled outputs from 24,649 to 11 by using patch-level summaries and correction terms. With only 50 simulator evaluations, SBOCF outperformed standard Bayesian optimization, achieving up to 290× lower median SSE on synthetic SrTiO3 benchmarks and producing accurate parameter estimates on experimental data without task-specific pretraining.
By Dasol Yoon, Poompol Buathong, Chia-Hao Lee, Yujia Zhang, David A. Muller, Peter I. Frazier
The paper introduces a ptychography‑supervised learning framework that transforms 4D‑STEM data into real‑time atomic‑resolution phase images. By training a compact model on physics‑constrained reference phase maps from a single AuPd dataset, the method predicts local phase patches directly from diffraction patterns without probe calibration or iterative optimization. The resulting workflow achieves an online latency of ~0.27 ms per probe position, a 1,000‑fold speed‑up over GPU‑accelerated ePIE, and maintains atomic‑scale lattice contrast while generalizing across materials, defocus conditions, and instruments.
By H. Yue, C. -C. Chen, C. -N. Hsiao, J. Cheng, Y. Liu, X. Z. Liao, Steve F. Shu
arXiv:2606. 09419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing materials characterization, yet most applications in electron microscopy rely solely on image contrast, overlooking the chemical and experimental context that shapes image formation.
By Jiadong Dan, Cheng Zhang, Leyi Loh, Ivan Verzhbitskiy, Yuan Chen, Goki Eda, Michel Bosman, N. Duane Loh
arXiv:2606. 10547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX) tomography in Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM) enables 3D compositional and elemental mapping at the nanoscale, but its use is limited by restricted tilt ranges and low-dose conditions required to avoid beam damage.
By Daniel del Pozo Bueno, Serge Brosset, Theo Monniez, Gabriele Navarro, Philippe Ciuciu, Zineb Saghi
arXiv:2607. 10388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming electron microscopy by enabling quantitative analysis of increasingly large and complex datasets for nanoparticle characterization.
By Evropi Toulkeridou, Jiafei Li, Leonardo Lari, Panagiotis Grammatikopoulos
arXiv:2505. 12650v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reconstructing atomistic crystal structures from a single noisy STEM projection is an ill-posed inverse problem: multiple lattices can explain similar contrast, and purely feed-forward models cannot verify physical validity.
By Yaotian Yang, Yiwen Tang, Yizhe Chen, Xiao Chen, Jiangjie Qiu, Hao Xiong, Haoyu Yin, Zhiyao Luo, Yifei Zhang, Sijia Tao, Wentao Li, Qinghua Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Wanli Ouyang, Bin Zhao, Xiaonan Wang, Fei Wei
BEAM3R is a dose estimation framework that operates in beam’s-eye-view (BEV) for both photon and proton beamlet calculations. It uses a Mamba‑3 state‑space depth‑sequence core combined with physics‑based transport conditioning, sharing a 2D CNN encoder‑decoder architecture to process per‑plane BEV slices. The system achieves high accuracy on the DoseRAD2026 challenge, with local gamma pass rates above 96% for CT‑based models and runtimes under 25 s for photon and 18 s for proton predictions.
By Chen Cheng, Michael Ferraro, James Grover, David E J Waddington, Emily Hewson
arXiv:2609.01018v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Architecture category. Hybrid method: a physics-based analytical pencil-beam (PB) dose engine followed by a 3-D convolutional residual-correction net...
By Lukas Zimmermann, Hermann Fuchs, Attila Simk\'o, Gerd Heilemann
arXiv:2609.21593v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) records a two-dimensional diffraction pattern at each electron-probe position, yie...
By Yuyan Guan, Haoran Zhang, Zian Mao, Antong Yang, Caifei Li, Jialong Wang, Chuying Ouyang, Hong Wang, Xiaoqin Zeng, Yujun Xie
Dose-PlanNet is a physics-guided 3D deep learning architecture that predicts radiotherapy dose distributions for prostate cancer. In a prospective trial, the model achieved target coverage comparable to clinical plans while slightly reducing target homogeneity, yet it significantly improved high‑dose organ‑at‑risk sparing. Automated plans met clinical acceptance criteria in 11 of 14 Moderate Hypofraction and 9 of 12 SBRT plans, demonstrating that physics-informed deep learning can accelerate radiotherapy workflows without compromising dosimetric quality.
By Ankit Bhattacharjee, Sougata Maity, Santam Chakraborty, Indranil Mallick
arXiv:2603. 29135v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous experimental systems are increasingly used in materials research to accelerate scientific discovery, but their performance is often limited by low-quality, noisy data.
By Jawad Chowdhury, Ganesh Narasimha, Jan-Chi Yang, Yongtao Liu, Rama Vasudevan