A combination of physics-based simulation and experiments has been critical to achieving ignition in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). Simulation and experiment both produce a mixture of scalar and images outputs, however only a subset of simulated data are available experimentally. We introduce a generative framework, called JointDiff, which enables predictions of conditional simulation input and output distributions from partial, multi-modal observations. The model leverages joint diffusion to unify forward surrogate modeling, inverse inference, and output imputation into one architecture. We train our model on a large ensemble of three-dimensional Multi-Rocket Piston simulations and demonstrate high accuracy, statistical robustness, and transferability to experiments performed at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). This work establishes JointDiff as a flexible generative surrogate for multi-modal scientific tasks, with implications for understanding diagnostic constraints, aligning simulation to experiment, and accelerating ICF design.
@article{arxiv.2601.21006,
title = {A joint diffusion approach to multi-modal inference in inertial confinement fusion},
author = {Michael S. Jones and Justin Kunimune and Daniel Casey and Bogdan Kustowski and Eugene Kur and Kelli Humbird},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.21006},
year = {2026}
}