A Deep Generative Model that Uses Physical Quantities to Generate and Retrieve Solar Magnetic Active Regions

Deep generative models have shown immense potential in generating unseen data that has the properties of real data. These models learn complex data-generating distributions starting from a smaller set of latent dimensions. However, generative models have encountered great skepticism in scientific domains due to the disconnection between generative latent vectors and scientifically relevant quantities. In this study, we integrate three types of machine learning models to generate solar magnetic patches in a physically interpretable manner and use those as a query to find matching patches in real observations. We use the magnetic field measurements from Space-weather HMI Active Region Patches (SHARPs) to train a generative adversarial network (GAN). We connect the physical properties of GAN-generated images with their latent vectors to train support vector machines (SVMs) that do mapping between physical and latent spaces. These produce directions in the GAN latent space along which known physical parameters of the SHARPs change. We train a self-supervised learner to make queries with generated images and find matches from real data. We find that the GAN–SVM combination enables users to produce high-quality patches that change smoothly only with a prescribed physical quantity, making generative models physically interpretable. We also show that GAN outputs can be used to retrieve real data that shares the same physical properties as the generated query. This elevates generative artificial intelligence from a means to produce artificial data to a novel tool for scientific data interrogation, supporting its applicability beyond the domain of heliophysics.