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