Junjing Deng

Iksung Kang, Ziling Wu, Yi Jiang et al.

Noninvasive X-ray imaging of nanoscale three-dimensional objects, e.g. integrated circuits (ICs), generally requires two types of scanning: ptychographic, which is translational and returns estimates of complex electromagnetic field through ICs; and tomographic scanning, which collects complex field projections from multiple angles. Here, we present Attentional Ptycho-Tomography (APT), an approach trained to provide accurate reconstructions of ICs despite incomplete measurements, using a dramatically reduced amount of angular scanning. Training process includes regularizing priors based on typical IC patterns and the physics of X-ray propagation. We demonstrate that APT with 12-time reduced angles achieves fidelity comparable to the gold standard with the original set of angles. With the same set of reduced angles, APT also outperforms baseline reconstruction methods. In our experiments, APT achieves 108-time aggregate reduction in data acquisition and computation without compromising quality. We expect our physics-assisted machine learning framework could also be applied to other branches of nanoscale imaging.

Ming Du, Volker Rose, Junjing Deng et al.

Ptychographic phase retrieval enables high-resolution imaging of complex samples but often suffers from artifacts such as grid pathology and multislice crosstalk, which degrade reconstructed images. We propose a plug-and-play (PnP) framework that integrates physics model-based phase retrieval with text-guided image editing using foundational diffusion models. By employing the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), our approach ensures consensus between data fidelity and artifact removal subproblems, maintaining physics consistency while enhancing image quality. Artifact removal is achieved using a text-guided diffusion image editing method (LEDITS++) with a pre-trained foundational diffusion model, allowing users to specify artifacts for removal in natural language. Demonstrations on simulated and experimental datasets show significant improvements in artifact suppression and structural fidelity, validated by metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and diffraction pattern consistency. This work highlights the combination of text-guided generative models and model-based phase retrieval algorithms as a transferable and fidelity-preserving method for high-quality diffraction imaging.

Canberk Ekmekci, Tekin Bicer, Zichao Wendy Di et al.

Ptychography is a scanning coherent diffractive imaging technique that enables imaging nanometer-scale features in extended samples. One main challenge is that widely used iterative image reconstruction methods often require significant amount of overlap between adjacent scan locations, leading to large data volumes and prolonged acquisition times. To address this key limitation, this paper proposes a Bayesian inversion method for ptychography that performs effectively even with less overlap between neighboring scan locations. Furthermore, the proposed method can quantify the inherent uncertainty on the ptychographic object, which is created by the ill-posed nature of the ptychographic inverse problem. At a high level, the proposed method first utilizes a deep generative model to learn the prior distribution of the object and then generates samples from the posterior distribution of the object by using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Our results from simulated ptychography experiments show that the proposed framework can consistently outperform a widely used iterative reconstruction algorithm in cases of reduced overlap. Moreover, the proposed framework can provide uncertainty estimates that closely correlate with the true error, which is not available in practice. The project website is available here.

Albert Vong, Steven Henke, Oliver Hoidn et al.

X-ray ptychography is a data-intensive imaging technique expected to become ubiquitous at next-generation light sources delivering many-fold increases in coherent flux. The need for real-time feedback under accelerated acquisition rates motivates surrogate reconstruction models like deep neural networks, which offer orders-of-magnitude speedup over conventional methods. However, existing deep learning approaches lack robustness across diverse experimental conditions. We propose an unsupervised training workflow emphasizing probe learning by combining experimentally-measured probes with synthetic, procedurally generated objects. This probe-centric approach enables a single physics-informed neural network to reconstruct unseen experiments across multiple beamlines; among the first demonstrations of multi-probe generalization. We find probe learning is equally important as in-distribution learning; models trained using this synthetic workflow achieve reconstruction fidelity comparable to those trained exclusively on experimental data, even when changing the type of synthetic training object. The proposed approach enables training of experiment-steering models that provide real-time feedback under dynamic experimental conditions.