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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 73 records · Page 4

Coincidence anomaly detection for unsupervised locating of edge localized modes in the DIII-D tokamak dataset

Using supervised learning to train a machine learning model to predict an on-coming edge localized mode (ELM) requires a large number of labeled samples. Creating an appropriate data set from the very large database of discharges at a long-running tokamak, such as DIII-D, would be a very time-consuming process for a human. Considering this need and difficulty, we use coincidence anomaly detection, an unsupervised learning technique, to train an ELM-identifier to identify and label ELMs in the DIII-D discharge database. This ELM-identifier shows, simultaneously, a precision of 0.68 and a recall of 0.63 (AUC is 0.73) on identifying ELMs in example time series pulled from thousands of discharges spanning five years. In a test set of 50 discharges, the algorithm finds over 26 thousand ELM candidates, more than 5 times the existing catalog of ELMs labeled by humans.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Unsupervised anomaly clustering via offset alignment in multivariate grid sensing data

Modern industries increasingly rely on multi-sensor technologies to acquire complex, high-dimensional data streams, enabling advanced monitoring and control systems. One critical application is online anomaly detection in electrical smart grids, where multivariate and multimodal sensing technologies play a vital role. However, detecting anomalies in such time-series data is challenging due to their inherent temporal dependencies and stochastic behavior. Traditional approaches based on supervised and semi-supervised learning methods depend on labeled datasets, which are often unavailable in real-world scenarios. While unsupervised methods have emerged as promising alternatives, these methods are highly susceptible to noise and outliers commonly present in sensing applications. Furthermore, deep learning-based anomaly detection methods, despite their performance, are often criticized for their black-box nature, limiting their applicability in safety-critical and online environments where interpretability and explainability are paramount. In this work, we propose an unsupervised anomaly clustering method leveraging a cyclic alignment-based offset detection algorithm for multivariate time-series signals. The proposed method is applied to multivariate data collected from vibrational, voltage, and magnetic field sensors deployed in a local grid substation. Our results demonstrate the robustness of the algorithm in accurately clustering various anomalies/events across different sensing modalities. Additionally, we compare the effectiveness of the proposed approach against a simple pattern-based anomaly detection method, which performs well for univariate data but fails to generalize to multivariate and multimodal time-series data.

Mukherjee, Subrata [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000309930338)↗

Pretraining Billion-Scale Geospatial Foundational Models on Frontier

As AI workloads increase in scope, generalization capability becomes challenging for small task-specific models and their demand for large amounts of labeled training samples increases. On the contrary, Foundation Models (FMs) are trained with internet-scale unlabeled data via self-supervised learning and have been shown to adapt to various tasks with minimal fine-tuning. Although large FMs have demonstrated significant impact in natural language processing and computer vision, efforts toward FMs for geospatial applications have been restricted to smaller size models, as pretraining larger models requires very large computing resources equipped with state-of-the-art hardware accelerators. Current satellite constellations collect 100+TBs of data a day, resulting in images that are billions of pixels and multimodal in nature. Such geospatial data poses unique challenges opening up new opportunities to develop FMs. We investigate billion scale FMs and HPC training profiles for geospatial applications by pretraining on publicly available data. We studied from end-to-end the performance and impact in the solution by scaling the model size. Our larger 3B parameter size model achieves up to 30% improvement in top1 scene classification accuracy when comparing a 100M parameter model. Moreover, we detail performance experiments on the Frontier supercomputer, America's first exascale system, where we study different model and data parallel approaches using PyTorch's Fully Sharded Data Parallel library. Specifically, we study variants of the Vision Transformer architecture (ViT), conducting performance analysis for ViT models with size up to 15B parameters. By discussing throughput and performance bottlenecks under different parallelism configurations, we offer insights on how to leverage such leadership-class HPC resources when developing large models for geospatial imagery applications.

Tsaris, Aristeidis (aris)↗

Vision Foundation Models in Remote Sensing: A survey

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have profoundly transformed the field of remote sensing (RS), revolutionizing data collection, processing, and analysis. Traditionally reliant on manual interpretation and task-specific models, RS research has been significantly enhanced by the advent of foundation models (FMs)—large-scale pretrained AI models capable of performing a wide array of tasks with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency. This article provides a comprehensive survey of FMs in the RS domain. We categorize these models based on their architectures, pretraining datasets, and methodologies. Through detailed performance comparisons, we highlight emerging trends and the significant advancements achieved by those FMs. Additionally, we discuss technical challenges, practical implications, and future research directions, addressing the need for high-quality data, computational resources, and improved model generalization. Our research also finds that pretraining methods, particularly self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques like contrastive learning (CL) and masked autoencoders (MAEs), remarkably enhance the performance and robustness of FMs. This survey aims to serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners by providing a panorama of advances and promising pathways for the continued development and application of FMs in RS.

data models↗

Emerging Flexible Designs for Geospatial Multimodal Foundation Models

Foundation models are rapidly transforming Earth observation by enabling scalable pretraining across diverse unlabeled geospatial modalities. However, their architectural diversity—ranging from encoder-only to encoder-decoder and masked autoencoding paradigms—makes it challenging to assess performance trade-offs in a consistent manner. In this work, we present an apples-to-apples comparison of leading FM architectures designed for geospatial multimodal reasoning, with a particular focus on flexibility across varied spectral band configurations. We standardize pretraining using identical self-supervised learning objectives and training datasets, and evaluate all models under consistent parameterization on the GEOBench benchmark across classification and segmentation tasks. Our results offer new insights into the design trade-offs between model flexibility, modality alignment, and downstream task performance. By highlighting architectural strengths and limitations under controlled conditions, this study provides practical guidance for building next-generation geospatial foundation models capable of robust multimodal reasoning.

Ambrozio Dias, Philipe [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000194277↗

Identifying atmospheric rivers and their poleward latent heat transport with generalizable neural networks: ARCNNv1

Abstract. Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are extreme weather events that can alleviate drought or cause billions of US dollars in flood damage. By transporting significant amounts of latent energy towards the poles, they are crucial to maintaining the climate system's energy balance. Since there is no first-principle definition of an AR grounded in geophysical fluid mechanics, AR identification is currently performed by a multitude of expert-defined, threshold-based algorithms. The variety of AR detection algorithms has introduced uncertainty into the study of ARs, and the thresholds of the algorithms may not generalize to new climate datasets and resolutions. We train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to detect ARs while representing this uncertainty; we name these models ARCNNs. To detect ARs without requiring new labeled data and labor-intensive AR detection campaigns, we present a semi-supervised learning framework based on image style transfer. This framework generalizes ARCNNs across climate datasets and input fields. Using idealized and realistic numerical models, together with observations, we assess the performance of the ARCNNs. We test the ARCNNs in an idealized simulation of a shallow-water fluid in which nearly all the tracer transport can be attributed to AR-like filamentary structures. In reanalysis and a high-resolution climate model, we use ARCNNs to calculate the contribution of ARs to meridional latent heat transport, and we demonstrate that this quantity varies considerably due to AR detection uncertainty.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Neural Scaling Laws for Jet Generation

Recently observed empirical scaling laws describe the performance of foundation-type models as three independent key quantities -- dataset size, compute, and model parameters -- are modified. Extracting these scaling laws informs the training of large complex models for which the tuning of hyperparameters in traditional ways is not feasible. This work for the first time explores if scaling laws can also be observed for the task of particle jet generation -- both relevant as a pre-training objective for foundation models and as in-situ simulation by itself. We indeed replicate the key logarithmic scaling law behavior for model-size scaling. Beyond studying the next token prediction validation loss of the generative model, we also study the sliced Wasserstein distance of five physical quantities that are not immediately available to the model during training. Our study shows that this quantity is monotonically related to the next token prediction validation loss, meaning that this loss is indeed a good proxy for the physics performance. For the scaling with dataset size and compute, we observe substantially weaker scaling behavior of both the loss and the sliced Wasserstein distance. We analyze this behavior by introducing the concept of a learnable window, and argue that autoregressive next token prediction on jet constituents exhibits comparatively rapid saturation relative to language-model studies. We discuss possible origins of this behavior, including the stochastic nature of QCD radiation and differences between generative and supervised learning tasks in collider physics.

Amram, Oz [Fermilab]↗

A Semi-supervised Hybrid Machine Learning Framework for the Qualification of Resistance Spot Welds

• Industries requiring high structural integrity, including automotive, aerospace, and construction, place considerable significance on weld quality classification. • The inspection normally involves human expertise through predefined quality metrics that are subjective, error-prone, and time-intensive • The challenge to classification model development is the scarcity of labeled data and imbalanced distributions in the data that are labeled. • This work develops a new hybrid methodology that achieves clustering using KMeans++ together with supervised classification to overcome these challenges. • The ensemble-based classifiers were identified as optimal, with accuracy enhancements of up to 8% using the pseudo-labeled dataset. • The work provides practical insight into feature engineering and machine learning integration in industrial quality assurance applications.

Rogers, Jeremy K. [Savannah River National Laborat↗

Particle trajectory representation learning with masked point modeling

Liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs) offer millimeter-scale 3D images of particle trajectories, enabling precision studies of neutrino oscillation, detection of supernova and solar neutrinos, searches for exotic dark matter, and proton decay. Current approaches utilize supervised machine learning models, requiring extensive simulations of particle physics and detector response that can introduce bias. Self-supervised learning (SSL), a machine learning approach that learns useful representations of unlabeled data from the data itself, has significantly advanced how large datasets are utilized for representation learning; however, its potential for applications to sensory data in high precision particle physics experiments remains largely unexplored. We introduce the Point-based liquid argon masked autoencoder (PoLAr-MAE), a self-supervised framework that learns physically meaningful representations directly from unlabeled LArTPC images. PoLAr-MAE achieves remarkable data efficiency for a point-level segmentation task, outperforming fully supervised methods in low data regimes. Linear classifiers on model outputs demonstrate robust performance across multiple downstream tasks. Our results position sensor-level SSL as a practical foundation model strategy for LArTPCs.

Young, Samuel [Stanford Univ., CA (United States)]↗

Machine Learning Enabled Position Detection for 6.78 MHz UAV Wireless Power Transfer System

This paper presents a novel supervised machine learning (SML) approach for accurate position detection of the receiver coil in wireless power transfer (WPT) systems using only secondary-side electrical measurements, with applications in autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) charging. The proposed method trains a supervised learning model to map measured secondary-side voltage and current features to the receiver’s spatial position with high precision. This enables an autonomous UAV to determine its location relative to the primary coil center, the optimal position for maximizing wireless charging efficiency. The sensing method is fully integrated into a standard WPT system, utilizing the same primary and secondary coils for both power transfer and position detection, thereby eliminating additional sensing hardware. The use of a 6.78 MHz operating frequency enhances positional sensitivity, as high-frequency near-field electromagnetic fields respond strongly to small spatial variations. Experimental validation is performed on a 30 W scaled prototype featuring a 210 mm × 140 mm primary coil, a 50 mm × 80 mm receiver coil, and a 15 mm air gap. Results demonstrate reliable position estimation and a strong correlation between predicted position and optimal coil alignment. This integrated framework unifying position detection and wireless charging offers a promising foundation for future autonomous electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) systems, enabling compact, hardware-efficient, and high-accuracy charging solutions.

Colak, Kerim [New York University]↗

Using supervised machine-learning approaches to understand abiotic stress tolerance and design resilient crops

Abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, cold, salinity and flooding significantly impact plant growth, development and productivity. As the planet has warmed, these abiotic stresses have increased in frequency and intensity, affecting the global food supply and making it imperative to develop stress-resilient crops. In the past 20 years, the development of omics technologies has contributed to the growth of datasets for plants grown under a wide range of abiotic environments. Integration of these rapidly growing data using machine-learning (ML) approaches can complement existing breeding efforts by providing insights into the mechanisms underlying plant responses to stressful conditions, which can be used to guide the design of resilient crops. In this review, we introduce ML approaches and provide examples of how researchers use these approaches to predict molecular activities, gene functions and genotype responses under stressful conditions. Finally, we consider the potential and challenges of using such approaches to enable the design of crops that are better suited to a changing environment. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Crops under stress: can we mitigate the impacts of climate change on agriculture and launch the ‘Resilience Revolution’?’.

abiotic stress↗

Contrastive Machine Learning with Gamma Spectroscopy Data Augmentations for Detecting Shielded Radiological Material Transfers

Data analysis techniques can be powerful tools for rapidly analyzing data and extracting information that can be used in a latent space for categorizing observations between classes of data. Machine learning models that exploit learned data relationships can address a variety of nuclear nonproliferation challenges like the detection and tracking of shielded radiological material transfers. The high resource cost of manually labeling radiation spectra is a hindrance to the rapid analysis of data collected from persistent monitoring and to the adoption of supervised machine learning methods that require large volumes of curated training data. Instead, contrastive self-supervised learning on unlabeled spectra can enhance models that are built on limited labeled radiation datasets. This work demonstrates that contrastive machine learning is an effective technique for leveraging unlabeled data in detecting and characterizing nuclear material transfers demonstrated on radiation measurements collected at an Oak Ridge National Laboratory testbed, where sodium iodide detectors measure gamma radiation emitted by material transfers between the High Flux Isotope Reactor and the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center. Label-invariant data augmentations tailored for gamma radiation detection physics are used on unlabeled spectra to contrastively train an encoder, learning a complex, embedded state space with self-supervision. A linear classifier is then trained on a limited set of labeled data to distinguish transfer spectra between byproducts and tracked nuclear material using representations from the contrastively trained encoder. The optimized hyperparameter model achieves a balanced accuracy score of 80.30%. Any given model—that is, a trained encoder and classifier—shows preferential treatment for specific subclasses of transfer types. Regardless of the classifier complexity, a supervised classifier using contrastively trained representations achieves higher accuracy than using spectra when trained and tested on limited labeled data.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

RINO: Renormalization Group Invariance with No Labels

A common challenge with supervised machine learning (ML) in high energy physics (HEP) is the reliance on simulations for labeled data, which can often mismodel the underlying collision or detector response. To help mitigate this problem of domain shift, we propose RINO (Renormalization Group Invariance with No Labels), a self-supervised learning approach that can instead pretrain models directly on collision data, learning embeddings invariant to renormalization group flow scales. In this work, we pretrain a transformer-based model on jets originating from quantum chromodynamic (QCD) interactions from the JetClass dataset, emulating real QCD-dominated experimental data, and then finetune on the JetNet dataset -- emulating simulations -- for the task of identifying jets originating from top quark decays. RINO demonstrates improved generalization from the JetNet training data to JetClass data compared to supervised training on JetNet from scratch, demonstrating the potential for RINO pretraining on real collision data followed by fine-tuning on small, high-quality MC datasets, to improve the robustness of ML models in HEP.

Hao, Zichun [Caltech] (ORCID:0000000256244907)↗

VoroClust

SAND2025-11465O VoroClust, also known as Voronoi Clustering, is a fast, density-based unsupervised clustering algorithm applicable to high-resolution and high-dimensional data. It operates as quickly as distance-based clustering methods while effectively capturing complex regional geometries, matching the performance of current density-based methods. VoroClust employs a data-centered sphere cover to reduce computational demands while preserving data topology. It propagates clusters outward from local density peaks. Although supervised machine learning is powerful for applications like image classification and segmentation, it requires comprehensive, consistent datasets, which many applications lack. Unsupervised clustering algorithms analyze the structure of each dataset rather than relying on similarities with other examples, making them well-suited for practical applications with insufficient or inappropriate data for supervised learning. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Ebeida, Mohamed [Sandia National Lab. (SNL-CA), Li↗

Implementation of stacked ensemble machine learning for the detection of surrogate plutonium contamination in soil via LIBS

Supervised machine learning methods have demonstrated increased utility for the quantification of lanthanide and actinide elements in atomic spectroscopy applications. This study implements laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for the identification of plutonium surrogate material (CeO 2 ) in soil matrices by training supervised machine learning methods on the recorded spectral data. A bagged ensemble using Random Forest yields the highest sensitivity predictions with a detection limit of 0.015 wt.% CeO 2 . However, high precision in Ce content prediction required the use of a stacked ensemble regression, which provided the superlative Ce quantification model with an error of 0.107% and a detection limit of 0.022 wt.%. Furthermore, the high performance of the stacked ensemble demonstrates its potential to enhance the accuracy and sensitivity of nuclear contaminant detection using field-deployable spectroscopic analyzers in real-world scenarios.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Enhancing synchrotron radiation micro-CT images using deep learning: an application of Noise2Inverse on bone imaging

In bone-imaging research, in situ synchrotron radiation micro-computed tomography (SRµCT) mechanical tests are used to investigate the mechanical properties of bone in relation to its microstructure. Low-dose computed tomography (CT) is used to preserve bone's mechanical properties from radiation damage, though it increases noise. To reduce this noise, the self-supervised deep learning method Noise2Inverse was used on low-dose SRµCT images where segmentation using traditional thresholding techniques was not possible. Simulated-dose datasets were created by sampling projection data at full, one-half, one-third, one-fourth and one-sixth frequencies of an in situ SRµCT mechanical test. After convolutional neural networks were trained, Noise2Inverse performance on all dose simulations was assessed visually and by analyzing bone microstructural features. Visually, high image quality was recovered for each simulated dose. Lacunae volume, lacunae aspect ratio and mineralization distributions shifted slightly in full, one-half and one-third dose network results, but were distorted in one-fourth and one-sixth dose network results. Following this, new models were trained using a larger dataset to determine differences between full dose and one-third dose simulations. Significant changes were found for all parameters of bone microstructure, indicating that a separate validation scan may be necessary to apply this technique for microstructure quantification. Noise present during data acquisition from the testing setup was determined to be the primary source of concern for Noise2Inverse viability. While these limitations exist, incorporating dose calculations and optimal imaging parameters enables self-supervised deep learning methods such as Noise2Inverse to be integrated into existing experiments to decrease radiation dose.

Obata, Yoshihiro (ORCID:0000000303659129)↗

Errant Beam Prognostics with Machine Leaning at SNS Accelerator

Particle Accelerators are complex machine with many pieces of equipment running in synchronization to deliver required beam. However, faults in particle accelerators reduce the availability of the beam for experiments affecting the overall science output. To avoid these faults, we apply anomaly detection techniques to predict any unusual behavior and perform preemptive actions to improve the total availability. Many researchers have adopted semi-supervised Machine Learning (ML) methods such as auto-encoders and variational auto-encoders for such tasks. However, supervised ML techniques designed for similarity learning such as Siamese Neural Network (SNN) can outperform semi-supervised or unsupervised methods for anomaly prediction. One of the challenges associated with application of ML models to particle accelerators is the variability in observed data over time due to system configuration changes. We employ conditional models such as Conditional Siamese Neural Networks (CSNN), and Conditional-VAE (CVAE) to learn the variability in the data by using beam configuration parameters as conditional input. We apply these models for errant beam prediction at Spallation Neutron Source accelerator under different system configurations and compare their performance. We demonstrate that CSNN outperforms CVAE in our application. This talk will present the data source, collection, analysis, data-preparation, model development, hyper-parameter studies and the results.

Rajput, Kishansingh↗