Unlocking Latent Dimensions: Exploring Representations of Large-Scale X-ray Scattering Data using Variational Autoencoders

Scientific user facilities generate X-ray scattering data faster than traditional workflows can process them. We address this challenge across two settings, offline dataset exploration and live on-the-fly analysis. We train a domain-specific attention-based Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE) on 1.5 million X-ray scattering images to learn low-dimensional representations capturing structural variation across diverse experimental conditions. The learned latent space reveals well-organized clusters and smooth trajectories reflecting experimental progression. It further supports controlled synthetic scattering image generation across diverse structural states. When deployed without retraining, the model organizes time-resolved film formation experiments at two synchrotron facilities into interpretable latent structures. Benchmarking against DINOv3 (ViT-7B), a general-purpose vision foundation model, demonstrates that domain-specific training yields more interpretable latent organization for scattering data. Both workflows are integrated within Latent Space Explorer, a component of the MLExchange platform, supporting interactive structural exploration across archived datasets and live experiments.

MLExchange: A web-based platform enabling exchangeable machine learning workflows

Machine learning (ML) algorithms are showing a growing trend in helping the scientific communities across different disciplines and institutions to address large and diverse data problems. However, many available ML tools are programmatically demanding and computationally costly. The MLExchange project aims to build a collaborative platform equipped with enabling tools that allow scientists and facility users who do not have a profound ML background to use ML and computational resources in scientific discovery. At the high level, we are targeting a full user experience where managing and exchanging ML algorithms, workflows, and data are readily available through web applications. So far, we have built four major components, i.e, the central job manager, the centralized content registry, user portal, and search engine, and successfully deployed these components on a testing server. Since each component is an independent container, the whole platform or its individual service(s) can be easily deployed at servers of different scales, ranging from a laptop (usually a single user) to high performance clusters (HPC) accessed (simultaneously) by many users. Thus, MLExchange renders flexible using scenarios -- users could either access the services and resources from a remote server or run the whole platform or its individual service(s) within their local network.