Diffusion Models for Generating Ballistic Spacecraft Trajectories

Generative modeling has drawn much attention in creative and scientific data generation tasks. Score-based Diffusion Models, a type of generative model that iteratively learns to denoise data, have shown state-of-the-art results on tasks such as image generation, multivariate time series forecasting, and robotic trajectory planning. Using score-based diffusion models, this work implements a novel generative framework to generate ballistic transfers from Earth to Mars. We further analyze the model's ability to learn the characteristics of the original dataset and its ability to produce transfers that follow the underlying dynamics. Ablation studies were conducted to determine how model performance varies with model size and trajectory temporal resolution. In addition, a performance benchmark is designed to assess the generative model's usefulness for trajectory design, conduct model performance comparisons, and lay the groundwork for evaluating different generative models for trajectory design beyond diffusion. The results of this analysis showcase several useful properties of diffusion models that, when taken together, can enable a future system for generative trajectory design powered by diffusion models.

Solution of physics-based inverse problems using conditional generative adversarial networks with full gradient penalty

The solution of probabilistic inverse problems for which the corresponding forward problem is constrained by physical principles is challenging. This is especially true if the dimension of the inferred vector is large and the prior information about it is in the form of a collection of samples. In this work, a novel deep learning based approach is developed and applied to solving these types of problems. The approach utilizes samples of the inferred vector drawn from the prior distribution and a physics-based forward model to generate training data for a conditional Wasserstein generative adversarial network (cWGAN). The cWGAN learns the probability distribution for the inferred vector conditioned on the measurement and produces samples from this distribution. The cWGAN developed in this work differs from earlier versions in that its critic is required to be 1-Lipschitz with respect to both the inferred and the measurement vectors and not just the former. This leads to a loss term with the full (and not partial) gradient penalty. It is shown that this rather simple change leads to a stronger notion of convergence for the conditional density learned by the cWGAN and a more robust and accurate sampling strategy. Through numerical examples it is shown that this change also translates to better accuracy when solving inverse problems. The numerical examples considered include illustrative problems where the true distribution and/or statistics are known, and a more complex inverse problem motivated by applications in biomechanics.

Uncertainty quantification for ptychography using normalizing flows

Ptychography, as an essential tool for high-resolution and nondestructive material characterization, presents a challenging large-scale nonlinear and non-convex inverse problem; however, its intrinsic photon statistics create clear opportunities for statistical-based deep learning approaches to tackle these challenges, which has been underexplored. In this work, we explore normalizing flows to obtain a surrogate for the high-dimensional posterior, which also enables the characterization of the uncertainty associated with the reconstruction: an extremely desirable capability when judging the reconstruction quality in the absence of ground truth, spotting spurious artifacts and guiding future experiments using the returned uncertainty patterns. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method on a synthetic sample with added noise and in various physical experimental settings.

Gaussian Process for Tomography

Tomographic reconstruction, despite its revolutionary impact on a wide range of applications, suffers from its ill-posed nature in that there is no unique solution because of limited and noisy measurements. Traditional optimization-based reconstruction relies on regularization to address this issue; however, it faces its own challenge because the type of regularizer and choice of regularization parameter are a critical but difficult decision. Moreover, traditional reconstruction yields point estimates for the reconstruction with no further indication of the quality of the solution. In this work we address these challenges by exploring Gaussian processes (GPs). Our proposed GP approach yields not only the reconstructed object through the posterior mean but also a quantification of the solution uncertainties through the posterior covariance. Furthermore, we explore the flexibility of the GP framework to provide a robust model of the information across various length scales in the object, as well as the complex noise in the measurements. We illustrate the proposed approach on both synthetic and real tomography images and show its unique capability of uncertainty quantification in the presence of various types of noise, as well as reconstruction comparison with existing methods.