Does an open-source ptychography framework reproduce its own paper?

Reproducing: PtyRAD: A High-Performance and Flexible Ptychographic Reconstruction Framework with Automatic Differentiation (Lee et al., Microscopy and Microanalysis, 2025). DOI: 10.1093/mam/ozaf070 System: Polaris · Status: In progress

An electron probe scanning a sample to form a diffraction pattern.

The goal

Check whether the authors' own open-source release of this ptychographic image-reconstruction framework actually reproduces its own published results end-to-end on independent hardware — useful both as due-diligence before adopting the framework for future imaging work, and as a template for future software-paper reproductions.

What happened

The framework's configuration format had changed since the paper's original snapshot, requiring a full config rewrite before anything would run. Two of six planned reconstruction targets have been rerun to completion so far, with the remaining four queued.

Results

Two of six reconstruction targets so far match the authors' own reference run to several significant figures.

• First target: per-iteration reconstruction loss trajectory matches the authors' own reference run to 3-4 significant figures.
• Second target: final reconstruction loss after 200 iterations matches the authors' bundled benchmark value to about 4 significant figures (0.3702 vs. 0.37020397).
• An informal speed comparison suggested a substantial advantage from newer GPU hardware, though this wasn't an apples-to-apples benchmark against the authors' original setup.
• Four more targets (including a regularization ablation and a hyperparameter-tuning demo) are queued to complete the full reproduction.

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