PosteriorBench is a new benchmark that evaluates how well generative inverse solvers recover full posterior distributions rather than just a single reconstruction. It tests four physics-based inverse problems—Darcy flow inversion, Poisson source recovery, carbon capture and storage, and light transport material inference—using high-fidelity reference posteriors generated by rejection sampling and MCMC. The benchmark employs five metrics (posterior-mean error, posterior-standard-deviation error, maximum mean discrepancy, sliced Wasserstein distance, and radially averaged power-spectrum error) to assess pointwise accuracy, uncertainty, distributional alignment, and global frequency fidelity, revealing significant distribution-matching gaps in current solvers and highlighting the importance of neural operators, guidance weights, and generation noise for posterior-variance calibration.
By Jiachen Yao, Zi-Siang Hsu, Xi Deng, Aditi Gupta, Xin Ju, Sally M Benson, Gege Wen, Anima Anandkumar
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
arXiv:2606. 29592v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.
By Can Polat, Erchin Serpedin, Mustafa Kurban, Hasan Kurban
The paper introduces a self‑supervised neural network that unifies single‑frame Fresnel coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) and overlapped ptychography. By using a fixed, pre‑estimated probe and optimizing with a Poisson negative log‑likelihood objective, the method reconstructs object patches from either a single diffraction frame or multiple overlapping measurements, achieving high SSIM scores and a ten‑fold improvement in photon‑dose efficiency. Demonstrations on synthetic patterns and real datasets from APS and LCLS show robust, high‑throughput reconstructions, with a 36× speedup over iterative solvers for a 10,304‑frame workload.
By Oliver Hoidn, Steven Henke, Albert Vong, Aashwin Mishra, Apurva Mehta, Matthew Seaberg
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.
arXiv:2607. 06252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many problems in science and engineering are difficult to model accurately, either due to unknown physical mechanisms, poorly quantified measurement uncertainty, or prohibitive computational costs of high-fidelity simulations.
By Fabian Schneider, Tapio Helin, Leila Taghizadeh
The paper presents a machine‑learning framework for reconstructing absorption and scattering coefficients in bilayered biological media from single‑distance, time‑resolved reflectance data. By training on a synthetic dataset generated with exact Monte Carlo simulations, the method outperforms traditional diffusion‑equation‑based inverse solvers in both speed and accuracy. It also estimates the dimensionality of the parameter space without prior knowledge of the number of layers, and suggests that future work could further improve accuracy using multi‑distance data.
By Caterina Amendola, Giulia Maffeis, Lorenzo Buffoni, Lorenzo Chicchi, Francesco Coghi, Duccio Fanelli, Raffaele Marino, Fabrizio Martelli, Riccardo Paoli, Lorenzo Pattelli, Lorenzo Spinelli
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:2608. 06448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering a periodic 3D crystal structure from sparse, unindexed electron diffraction (ED) observations is a challenging generative inverse problem.
By Germain Poloudenny, Ya\"el Fr\'egier, Arnaud Demorti\`ere
arXiv:2508. 05321v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Assume you encounter an inverse problem that shall be solved for a large number of data, but no ground-truth data is available.
By Laura Hellwege, Johann Christopher Engster, Moritz Schaar, Thorsten M. Buzug, Maik Stille
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:2608. 09382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electromagnetic inverse scattering is a nonlinear and ill-posed problem, where accurate reconstruction is challenging due to measurement limitations, noise, and high computational costs, especially for 3-D imaging.
By Yutong Du, Zicheng Liu, Bo Qi, Yali Zong, Peixian Han