Alexander Scheinker

Mahindra Rautela, Alexander Most, Siddharth Mansingh et al.

Most PDE foundation models are pretrained and fine-tuned on fluid-centric benchmarks. Their utility under extreme-loading material dynamics remains unclear. We benchmark out-of-distribution transfer on two discontinuity-dominated regimes in which shocks, evolving interfaces, and fracture produce highly non-smooth fields: shock-driven multi-material interface dynamics (perturbed layered interface or PLI) and dynamic fracture/failure evolution (FRAC). We formulate the downstream task as terminal-state prediction, i.e., learning a long-horizon map that predicts the final state directly from the first snapshot without intermediate supervision. Using a unified training and evaluation protocol, we evaluate two open-source pretrained PDE foundation models, POSEIDON and MORPH, and compare fine-tuning from pretrained weights against training from scratch across training-set sizes to quantify sample efficiency under distribution shift.

Mahindra Rautela, Alan Williams, Alexander Scheinker

Charged particle dynamics under the influence of electromagnetic fields is a challenging spatiotemporal problem. Many high performance physics-based simulators for predicting behavior in a charged particle beam are computationally expensive, limiting their utility for solving inverse problems online. The problem of estimating upstream six-dimensional phase space given downstream measurements of charged particles in an accelerator is an inverse problem of growing importance. This paper introduces a reverse Latent Evolution Model (rLEM) designed for temporal inversion of forward beam dynamics. In this two-step self-supervised deep learning framework, we utilize a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to project 6D phase space projections of a charged particle beam into a lower-dimensional latent distribution. Subsequently, we autoregressively learn the inverse temporal dynamics in the latent space using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. The coupled CVAE-LSTM framework can predict 6D phase space projections across all upstream accelerating sections based on single or multiple downstream phase space measurements as inputs. The proposed model also captures the aleatoric uncertainty of the high-dimensional input data within the latent space. This uncertainty, which reflects potential uncertain measurements at a given module, is propagated through the LSTM to estimate uncertainty bounds for all upstream predictions, demonstrating the robustness of the LSTM against in-distribution variations in the input data.

Alexander Scheinker, Alexander Plastun, Peter Ostroumov

We address the problem of recovering a time-varying 4D distribution from a sparse sequence of 2D projections - analogous to novel-view synthesis from sparse cameras, but applied to the 4D transverse phase space density $ρ(x,p_x,y,p_y)$ of charged particle beams. Direct single shot measurement of this high-dimensional distribution is physically impossible in real particle accelerator systems; only limited 1D or 2D projections are accessible. We propose PhaseFlow4D, a feedback-guided latent diffusion model that reconstructs and tracks the full 4D phase space from incomplete 2D observations alone, with built-in hard physics constraints. Our core technical contribution is a 4D VAE whose decoder generates the full 4D phase space tensor, from which 2D projections are analytically computed and compared against 2D beam measurements. This projection-consistency constraint guarantees physical correctness by construction - not as a soft penalty, but as an architectural prior. An adaptive feedback loop then continuously tunes the conditioning vector of the latent diffusion model to track time-varying distributions online without retraining. We validate on multi-particle simulations of heavy-ion beams at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), where full physics simulations require $\sim$6 hours on a 100-core HPC system. PhaseFlow4D achieves accurate 4D reconstructions 11000$\times$ faster while faithfully tracking distribution shifts under time-varying source conditions - demonstrating that principled generative reconstruction under incomplete observations transfers robustly beyond visual domains.

Mahindra Rautela, Alexander Scheinker

Virtual beam diagnostics relies on computationally intensive beam dynamics simulations where high-dimensional charged particle beams evolve through the accelerator. We propose Latent Evolution Model (LEM), a hybrid machine learning framework with an autoencoder that projects high-dimensional phase spaces into lower-dimensional representations, coupled with transformers to learn temporal dynamics in the latent space. This approach provides a common foundational framework addressing multiple interconnected challenges in beam diagnostics. For \textit{forward modeling}, a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) encodes 15 unique projections of the 6D phase space into a latent representation, while a transformer predicts downstream latent states from upstream inputs. For \textit{inverse problems}, we address two distinct challenges: (a) predicting upstream phase spaces from downstream observations by utilizing the same CVAE architecture with transformers trained on reversed temporal sequences along with aleatoric uncertainty quantification, and (b) estimating RF settings from the latent space of the trained LEM using a dedicated dense neural network that maps latent representations to RF parameters. For \textit{tuning problems}, we leverage the trained LEM and RF estimator within a Bayesian optimization framework to determine optimal RF settings that minimize beam loss. This paper summarizes our recent efforts and demonstrates how this unified approach effectively addresses these traditionally separate challenges.

Shaifalee Saxena, Rafael Fierro, Alexander Scheinker

Reinforcement learning has shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but learned policies often degrade in performance when test conditions differ from the training distribution. This limitation is especially important in contact-rich tasks such as pushing and pick-and-place, where changes in goals, contact conditions, or robot dynamics can drive the system out-of-distribution at inference time. In this paper, we investigate a hybrid controller that combines reinforcement learning with bounded extremum seeking to improve robustness under such conditions. In the proposed approach, deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) policies are trained under standard conditions on the robotic pushing and pick-and-place tasks, and are then combined with bounded ES during deployment. The RL policy provides fast manipulation behavior, while bounded ES ensures robustness of the overall controller to time variations when operating conditions depart from those seen during training. The resulting controller is evaluated under several out-of-distribution settings, including time-varying goals and spatially varying friction patches.

Alexander Scheinker

Adaptive physics-informed super-resolution diffusion is developed for non-invasive virtual diagnostics of the 6D phase space density of charged particle beams. An adaptive variational autoencoder (VAE) embeds initial beam condition images and scalar measurements to a low-dimensional latent space from which a 326 pixel 6D tensor representation of the beam's 6D phase space density is generated. Projecting from a 6D tensor generates physically consistent 2D projections. Physics-guided super-resolution diffusion transforms low-resolution images of the 6D density to high resolution 256x256 pixel images. Un-supervised adaptive latent space tuning enables tracking of time-varying beams without knowledge of time-varying initial conditions. The method is demonstrated with experimental data and multi-particle simulations at the HiRES UED. The general approach is applicable to a wide range of complex dynamic systems evolving in high-dimensional phase space. The method is shown to be robust to distribution shift without re-training.

Mahindra Rautela, Alexander Scheinker, Bradley Love et al.

PDE foundation models are typically pretrained on large, diverse corpora of PDE datasets and can be adapted to new settings with limited task-specific data. However, most downstream evaluations focus on forward problems, such as autoregressive rollout prediction. In this work, we study an inverse problem in inertial confinement fusion (ICF): estimating system parameters (inputs) from multi-modal, snapshot-style observations (outputs). Using the open JAG benchmark, which provides hyperspectral X-ray images and scalar observables per simulation, we finetune the PDE foundation model and train a lightweight task-specific head to jointly reconstruct hyperspectral images and regress system parameters. The fine-tuned model achieves accurate hyperspectral reconstruction (test MSE 1.2e-3) and strong parameter-estimation performance (up to R^2=0.995). Data-scaling experiments (5%-100% of the training set) show consistent improvements in both reconstruction and regression losses as the amount of training data increases, with the largest marginal gains in the low-data regime. Finally, finetuning from pretrained MORPH weights outperforms training the same architecture from scratch, demonstrating that foundation-model initialization improves sample efficiency for data-limited inverse problems in ICF.

Shaifalee Saxena, Alan Williams, Rafael Fierro et al.

In this paper, we study the use of robust model independent bounded extremum seeking (ES) feedback control to improve the robustness of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) controllers for a class of nonlinear time-varying systems. DRL has the potential to learn from large datasets to quickly control or optimize the outputs of many-parameter systems, but its performance degrades catastrophically when the system model changes rapidly over time. Bounded ES can handle time-varying systems with unknown control directions, but its convergence speed slows down as the number of tuned parameters increases and, like all local adaptive methods, it can get stuck in local minima. We demonstrate that together, DRL and bounded ES result in a hybrid controller whose performance exceeds the sum of its parts with DRL taking advantage of historical data to learn how to quickly control a many-parameter system to a desired setpoint while bounded ES ensures its robustness to time variations. We present a numerical study of a general time-varying system and a combined ES-DRL controller for automatic tuning of the Low Energy Beam Transport section at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center linear particle accelerator.

Alexander Scheinker, Alan Williams

Beam loss (BLM) and beam current monitors (BCM) are ubiquitous at particle accelerator around the world. These simple devices provide non-invasive high level beam measurements, but give no insight into the detailed 6D (x,y,z,px,py,pz) beam phase space distributions or dynamics. We show that generative conditional latent diffusion models can learn intricate patterns to map waveforms of tens of BLMs or BCMs along an accelerator to detailed 2D projections of a charged particle beam's 6D phase space density. This transformational method can be used at any particle accelerator to transform simple non-invasive devices into detailed beam phase space diagnostics. We demonstrate this concept via multi-particle simulations of the high intensity beam in the kilometer-long LANSCE linear proton accelerator.

Mahindra Rautela, Alan Williams, Alexander Scheinker

Complex dynamical systems, such as particle accelerators, often require complicated and time-consuming tuning procedures for optimal performance. It may also be required that these procedures estimate the optimal system parameters, which govern the dynamics of a spatiotemporal beam -- this can be a high-dimensional optimization problem. To address this, we propose a Classifier-pruned Bayesian Optimization-based Latent space Tuner (CBOL-Tuner), a framework for efficient exploration within a temporally-structured latent space. The CBOL-Tuner integrates a convolutional variational autoencoder (CVAE) for latent space representation, a long short-term memory (LSTM) network for temporal dynamics, a dense neural network (DNN) for parameter estimation, and a classifier-pruned Bayesian optimizer (C-BO) to adaptively search and filter the latent space for optimal solutions. CBOL-Tuner demonstrates superior performance in identifying multiple optimal settings and outperforms alternative global optimization methods.

Mahindra Rautela, Alan Williams, Alexander Scheinker

Particle accelerators are complex systems that focus, guide, and accelerate intense charged particle beams to high energy. Beam diagnostics present a challenging problem due to limited non-destructive measurements, computationally demanding simulations, and inherent uncertainties in the system. We propose a two-step unsupervised deep learning framework named as Conditional Latent Autoregressive Recurrent Model (CLARM) for learning the spatiotemporal dynamics of charged particles in accelerators. CLARM consists of a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) transforming six-dimensional phase space into a lower-dimensional latent distribution and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network capturing temporal dynamics in an autoregressive manner. The CLARM can generate projections at various accelerator modules by sampling and decoding the latent space representation. The model also forecasts future states (downstream locations) of charged particles from past states (upstream locations). The results demonstrate that the generative and forecasting ability of the proposed approach is promising when tested against a variety of evaluation metrics.

Amber Boehnlein, Markus Diefenthaler, Cristiano Fanelli et al.

Advances in machine learning methods provide tools that have broad applicability in scientific research. These techniques are being applied across the diversity of nuclear physics research topics, leading to advances that will facilitate scientific discoveries and societal applications. This Review gives a snapshot of nuclear physics research which has been transformed by machine learning techniques.

Alexander Scheinker

Machine learning (ML) tools such as encoder-decoder convolutional neural networks (CNN) can represent incredibly complex nonlinear functions which map between combinations of images and scalars. For example, CNNs can be used to map combinations of accelerator parameters and images which are 2D projections of the 6D phase space distributions of charged particle beams as they are transported between various particle accelerator locations. Despite their strengths, applying ML to time-varying systems, or systems with shifting distributions, is an open problem, especially for large systems for which collecting new data for re-training is impractical or interrupts operations. Particle accelerators are one example of large time-varying systems for which collecting detailed training data requires lengthy dedicated beam measurements which may no longer be available during regular operations. We present a recently developed method of adaptive ML for time-varying systems. Our approach is to map very high (N>100k) dimensional inputs (a combination of scalar parameters and images) into the low dimensional (N~2) latent space at the output of the encoder section of an encoder-decoder CNN. We then actively tune the low dimensional latent space-based representation of complex system dynamics by the addition of an adaptively tuned feedback vector directly before the decoder sections builds back up to our image-based high-dimensional phase space density representations. This method allows us to learn correlations within and to quickly tune the characteristics of incredibly high parameter systems and to track their evolution in real time based on feedback without massive new data sets for re-training.

Alexander Scheinker, Frederick Cropp, Sergio Paiagua et al.

Powerful deep learning tools, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), are able to learn the input-output relationships of large complicated systems directly from data. Encoder-decoder deep CNNs are able to extract features directly from images, mix them with scalar inputs within a general low-dimensional latent space, and then generate new complex 2D outputs which represent complex physical phenomenon. One important challenge faced by deep learning methods is large non-stationary systems whose characteristics change quickly with time for which re-training is not feasible. In this paper we present a method for adaptive tuning of the low-dimensional latent space of deep encoder-decoder style CNNs based on real-time feedback to quickly compensate for unknown and fast distribution shifts. We demonstrate our approach for predicting the properties of a time-varying charged particle beam in a particle accelerator whose components (accelerating electric fields and focusing magnetic fields) are also quickly changing with time.