HXI-DLA2: A Physics-Constrained Deep Learning Algorithm for the ASO-S Hard X-ray Imager
Solar flare hard X-ray imaging is a key diagnostic of flare energy release and electron acceleration. The Hard X-ray Imager (HXI) aboard ASO-S compresses the two-dimensional source distribution into counts measured by 91 sub-collimators, making image reconstruction an inherently underdetermined inverse problem. Conventional algorithms such as CLEAN rely on point-source priors and manual tuning, whereas recent deep-learning methods offer no guarantee that their reconstructions obey the instrument's modulation-sampling forward equation. In this work we show that the counts decompose into two nearly decoupled quantities---the counts average energy, which tracks the total source flux, and the normalized counts distribution, which encodes the source spatial structure---and we exploit this property to construct a physics-constrained network, the Hard X-ray Imager Deep Learning Algorithm 2 (HXI-DLA2). Non-negativity and exact counts-average-energy closure are enforced at the network output, while a distribution-consistency loss aligns the re-projected counts with the measurement, so that the reconstruction satisfies the forward equation by construction. Tests on simulated Gaussian sources, observed soft X-ray morphologies, and a real HXI flare event show two main improvements over existing methods: the limiting resolvable dynamic range of double sources is pushed well beyond that of conventional imaging algorithms and our previous method; and complex morphologies on which prior reconstructions degrade, such as ring-like and diffuse structures, are reliably reconstructed, with the real-event result consistent with contemporaneous SDO/AIA imaging. Embedding the instrumental forward equation as a hard constraint while learning source priors from data offers a general inversion framework for modulation imaging.