Transfer Learning of High-Fidelity Opacity Spectra in Autoencoders and Surrogate Models

Simulations of high energy density physics are expensive, largely in part for the need to produce nonlocal thermodynamic equilibrium opacities. High-fidelity spectra may reveal new physics in the simulations not seen with low-fidelity spectra, but the cost of these simulations also scales with the level of fidelity of the opacities being used. Neural networks are capable of reproducing these spectra, but neural networks need data to train them, which limits the level of fidelity of the training data. This article demonstrates that it is possible to reproduce high-fidelity spectra with median errors in the realm of 3%–4% using as few as 50 samples of high-fidelity Krypton data by performing transfer learning on a neural network trained on many times more low-fidelity data.