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At least 127 records · Page 7

Fundamental limit of jet tagging

Identifying the origin of high-energy hadronic jets (jet tagging) has been a critical benchmark problem for machine learning in particle physics. Jets are ubiquitous at colliders and are complex objects that serve as prototypical examples of collections of particles to be categorized. Over the last decade, machine learning-based classifiers have replaced classical observables as the state of the art in jet tagging. Increasingly complex machine learning models are leading to increasingly more effective tagger performance. Our goal is to address the question of convergence—are we getting close to the fundamental limit on jet tagging or is there still potential for computational, statistical, and physical insights for further improvements? We address this question using state-of-the-art generative models to create a realistic, synthetic dataset with a known jet tagging optimum. Various state-of-the-art taggers are deployed on this dataset, showing that there is a significant gap between their performance and the optimum. Our dataset and software are made public to provide a benchmark task for future developments in jet tagging and other areas of particle physics.

Artificial intelligence↗

Advanced Shuttle Strategies for Parallel QCCD Architectures

Trapped ions (TIs) are at the forefront of quantum computing implementation, offering unparalleled coherence, fidelity, and connectivity. However, the scalability of TI systems is hampered by the limited capacity of individual ion traps, necessitating intricate ion shuttling for advanced computational tasks. The quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) framework has emerged as a promising solution, facilitating ion mobility for universal quantum computation. Current QCCD architectures predominantly feature a linear topology, which is increasingly recognized as inefficient for complex quantum operations. Anticipating the shift toward more efficacious designs, this article introduces an innovative quantum scheduling strategy optimized for parallel QCCD topologies. Our strategy proposes a probabilistic formula for ion movement, alongside ingenious methods for local layer generation and layer compression, yielding a significant reduction in ion shuttle times. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our strategy not only substantially outstrips the linear model but also exhibits better performance over other parallel strategies that employ greedy algorithms. This is achieved through our nuanced resolution of complexities, such as traffic blocks and trap capacity limitations. The consequent reduction in shuttle operations leads to lower energy consumption and an enhancement in the quantum computer's fidelity, ultimately accelerating program execution times.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

ARCH: Large-scale knowledge graph via aggregated narrative codified health records analysis

Objective: Electronic health record (EHR) systems contain a wealth of clinical data stored as both codified data and free-text narrative notes (NLP). The complexity of EHR presents challenges in feature representation, information extraction, and uncertainty quantification. Here, to address these challenges, we proposed an efficient Aggregated naRrative Codified Health (ARCH) records analysis to generate a large-scale knowledge graph (KG) for a comprehensive set of EHR codified and narrative features. Methods: Using data from 12.5 million Veterans Affairs patients, ARCH first derives embedding vectors and generates similarities along with associated p-values to measure the strength of relatedness between clinical features with statistical certainty quantification. Next, ARCH performs a sparse embedding regression to remove indirect linkage between features to build a sparse KG. Finally, ARCH was validated on various clinical tasks, including detecting known relationships between entity pairs, predicting drug side effects, disease phenotyping, as well as sub-typing Alzheimer’s disease patients. Results: ARCH produces high-quality clinical embeddings and KG for over 60,000 codified and narrative EHR concepts. The KG and embeddings are visualized in the R-shiny powered web-API.3 ARCH achieved high accuracy in detecting EHR concept relationships, with AUCs of 0.926 (codified) and 0.861 (NLP) for similar EHR concepts, and 0.810 (codified) and 0.843 (NLP) for related pairs. It detected drug side effects with a 0.723 AUC, which improved to 0.826 after fine-tuning. Using both codified and NLP features, the detection power increased significantly. Compared to other methods, ARCH has superior accuracy and enhances weakly supervised phenotyping algorithms’ performance. Notably, it successfully categorized Alzheimer’s patients into two subgroups with varying mortality rates. Conclusion: The proposed ARCH algorithm generates large-scale high-quality semantic representations and knowledge graph for both codified and NLP EHR features, useful for a wide range of predictive modeling tasks.

Electronic health records↗

Energy storage planning for enhanced resilience of power systems against wildfires and heatwaves

Extreme weather events pose significant risks to power grid stability due to their severe consequences and potential for widespread failures. Energy storage systems hold great potential for enhancing grid resilience against such events by providing reliable power during peak demand periods. However, accurately quantifying the size, location, and investment costs of new energy storage assets is a complex task, as energy storage planning decisions depend on the investment choices of other generation technologies and the integration of new transmission projects. Here, this paper presents a novel capacity expansion planning framework that simultaneously optimizes investments in energy storage, generation, and transmission, determining their optimal size, location, and type, while incorporating extreme weather events into long-term planning. More specifically, our stress-event-informed planning framework integrates the impact of heatwaves and wildfires into the planning process, identifying least-cost investment solutions that comply with policy goals and enhance grid resilience. The proposed framework employs machine-learning-based modeling to project heatwave-induced loads and performance-based risk assessment to evaluate wildfire-driven transmission line derates. Using industry-standard datasets to accurately represent the transmission topology of the Western Interconnection (WI) system, the proposed framework is applied to the WI 40-zone system, with investment decisions reported for the years 2030, 2035, and 2040. Simulation results reveal that with just a 10% increase in investment costs, resilience against extreme events can be significantly improved, with investment decisions heavily favoring energy storage, particularly 4-hour energy storage systems.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Numerical simulation of coupled THM behaviour of full-scale EBS in backfilled experimental gallery in the Horonobe URL

Bentonite-based engineered barrier system (EBS) is a key component of many repository designs for the geological disposal of high-level radioactive waste. Given the complexity and interaction of the phenomena affecting the barrier system, coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) numerical analyses are a potentially useful tool for a better understanding of their behaviour. In this context, a Task (the Horonobe EBS experiment) was undertaken to study, using numerical analyses, the thermo-hydro-mechanical (and thermo-hydro) interactions in bentonite based engineered barriers within the international cooperative project DECOVALEX 2023. One full-scale in-situ experiment and four laboratory experiments, largely complementary, were selected for modelling. The Horonobe EBS experiment is a temperature-controlled non-isothermal experiment combined with artificial groundwater injection. The Horonobe EBS experiment consists of the heating and cooling phases. Six research teams performed the THM or TH (depended on research team approach) numerical analyses using a variety of computer codes, formulations and constitutive laws. Finally, for each experiment, the basic features of the analyses are described and the comparison between calculations and laboratory experiments and field observations are presented and discussed.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

LLM Benchmarking with LLaMA2: Evaluating Code Development Performance Across Multiple Programming Languages

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for automating various tasks in software development. This paper evaluates the capabilities of the LLaMA 2-70B model in automating these tasks for scientific applications written in commonly used programming languages. Using representative test problems, we assess the model's capacity to generate code, documentation, and unit tests, as well as its ability to translate existing code between commonly used programming languages. Our comprehensive analysis evaluates the compilation, runtime behavior, and correctness of the generated and translated code. Additionally, we assess the quality of automatically generated code, documentation, and unit tests. Here, our results indicate that while LLaMA 2-70B frequently generates syntactically correct and functional code for simpler numerical tasks, it encounters substantial difficulties with more complex, parallelized, or distributed computations, requiring considerable manual corrections. We identify key limitations and suggest areas for future improvements to better leverage AI-driven automation in scientific computing workflows.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Data imbalance in drug response prediction: multi-objective optimization approach in deep learning setting

Abstract Drug response prediction (DRP) methods tackle the complex task of associating the effectiveness of small molecules with the specific genetic makeup of the patient. Anti-cancer DRP is a particularly challenging task requiring costly experiments as underlying pathogenic mechanisms are broad and associated with multiple genomic pathways. The scientific community has exerted significant efforts to generate public drug screening datasets, giving a path to various machine learning models that attempt to reason over complex data space of small compounds and biological characteristics of tumors. However, the data depth is still lacking compared to application domains like computer vision or natural language processing domains, limiting current learning capabilities. To combat this issue and improves the generalizability of the DRP models, we are exploring strategies that explicitly address the imbalance in the DRP datasets. We reframe the problem as a multi-objective optimization across multiple drugs to maximize deep learning model performance. We implement this approach by constructing Multi-Objective Optimization Regularized by Loss Entropy loss function and plugging it into a Deep Learning model. We demonstrate the utility of proposed drug discovery methods and make suggestions for further potential application of the work to achieve desirable outcomes in the healthcare field.

Biochemistry & Molecular Biology↗

Alquimia v1.0: a generic interface to biogeochemical codes – a tool for interoperable development, prototyping and benchmarking for multiphysics simulators

Alquimia v1.0 is a generic interface to geochemical solvers that facilitates development of multiphysics simulators by enabling code coupling, prototyping and benchmarking. The interface enforces the function arguments and their types for setting up, solving, serving up output data and carrying out other common auxiliary tasks while providing a set of structures for data transfer between the multiphysics code driving the simulation and the geochemical solver. Alquimia relies on a single-cell approach that permits operator splitting coupling and parallel computation. We describe the implementation in Alquimia of two widely used open-source codes that perform geochemical calculations: PFLOTRAN and CrunchFlow. We then exemplify its use for the implementation and simulation of reactive transport in porous media by two open-source flow and transport simulators: Amanzi and ParFlow. We also demonstrate its use for the simulation of coupled processes in novel multiphysics applications including the effect of multiphase flow on reaction rates at the pore scale with OpenFOAM, the role of complex biogeochemical processes in land surface models such as the E3SM Land Model (ELM) and the impact of surface–subsurface hydrological interactions on hydrogeochemical export from watersheds with the Advanced Terrestrial Simulator (ATS). These applications make it apparent that the availability of a well-defined yet flexible interface has the potential to improve the software development workflow, freeing up resources to focus on advances in process models and mechanistic understanding of coupled problems.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Enabling HPC Scientific Workflows for Serverless

The convergence of edge computing, big data analytics, and AI with traditional scientific calculations is increasingly being adopted in HPC workflows. Workflow management systems are crucial for managing and orchestrating these complex computational tasks. However, it is difficult to identify patterns within the growing population of HPC workflows. Serverless has emerged as a novel computing paradigm, offering dynamic resource allocation, quick response time, fine-grained resource management and auto-scaling. In this paper, we propose a framework to enable HPC scientific workflows on serverless. Our approach integrates a widely used traditional HPC workflow generator with an HPC serverless workflow management system to create benchmark suites of scientific workflows with diverse characteristics. These workflows can be executed on different serverless platforms. We comprehensively compare executing workflows on traditional local containers and serverless computing platforms. Our results show that serverless can reduce CPU and memory usage respectively by 78.11% and 73.92% without compromising performance.

Andrei da silva, Anderson↗

Evaluating Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) frameworks for the Accelerator Control System

As particle accelerator control systems evolve in complexity and scale, the need for responsive, scalable, and cost-effective computational infrastructure becomes increasingly critical. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offers an alternative to traditional monolithic architecture by enabling event-driven execution, automatic scaling, and fine-grained resource utilization. This paper explores the applicability and performance of FaaS frameworks in the context of a modern particle accelerator control system, with the objective of evaluating their suitability for short lived and triggered workloads. In this paper, we evaluate prominent open-source FaaS platforms in executing functional logic, triggers, and diagnostics routines. Evaluation metrics consist of cold-start latency, scalability, performance, integration with other open-source tools like Kafka. Experimental workloads were designed to simulate real-world control tasks when implemented as stateless FaaS functions. These workloads were benchmarked under various invocation loads and network conditions. Self-hosted FaaS platforms, when deployed within accelerator networks, offer greater control over execution environment, better integration with legacy systems, and support for real-time guarantees when paired with message queues. Based on lessons learned and evaluation metrics, this paper describes reliability of the FaaS framework for the Accelerator Control Systems (ACS).

Jaikar, A. [Fermilab] (ORCID:0000000332046217)↗

Impact of Color Space and Color Resolution on Vehicle Recognition Models

In this study, we analyze both linear and nonlinear color mappings by training on versions of a curated dataset collected in a controlled campus environment. We experiment with color space and color resolution to assess model performance in vehicle recognition tasks. Color encodings can be designed in principle to highlight certain vehicle characteristics or compensate for lighting differences when assessing potential matches to previously encountered objects. The dataset used in this work includes imagery gathered under diverse environmental conditions, including daytime and nighttime lighting. Experimental results inform expectations for possible improvements with automatic color space selection through feature learning. Moreover, we find there is only a gradual decrease in model performance with degraded color resolution, which suggests the need for simplified data collection and processing. By focusing on the most critical features, we could see improved model generalization and robustness, as the model becomes less prone to overfitting to noise or irrelevant details in the data. Such a reduction in resolution will lower computational complexity, leading to quicker training and inference times.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

SymbolNet: neural symbolic regression with adaptive dynamic pruning for compression

Abstract Compact symbolic expressions have been shown to be more efficient than neural network (NN) models in terms of resource consumption and inference speed when implemented on custom hardware such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), while maintaining comparable accuracy (Tsoi et al 2024 EPJ Web Conf. 295 09036). These capabilities are highly valuable in environments with stringent computational resource constraints, such as high-energy physics experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. However, finding compact expressions for high-dimensional datasets remains challenging due to the inherent limitations of genetic programming (GP), the search algorithm of most symbolic regression (SR) methods. Contrary to GP, the NN approach to SR offers scalability to high-dimensional inputs and leverages gradient methods for faster equation searching. Common ways of constraining expression complexity often involve multistage pruning with fine-tuning, which can result in significant performance loss. In this work, we propose S y m b o l N e t , a NN approach to SR specifically designed as a model compression technique, aimed at enabling low-latency inference for high-dimensional inputs on custom hardware such as FPGAs. This framework allows dynamic pruning of model weights, input features, and mathematical operators in a single training process, where both training loss and expression complexity are optimized simultaneously. We introduce a sparsity regularization term for each pruning type, which can adaptively adjust its strength, leading to convergence at a target sparsity ratio. Unlike most existing SR methods that struggle with datasets containing more than O ( 10 ) inputs, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on the LHC jet tagging task (16 inputs), MNIST (784 inputs), and SVHN (3072 inputs).

Tsoi, Ho Fung (ORCID:0000000225502184)↗

Multiphysics Modeling of Microreactors with NEAMS codes, and Validation Based on KRUSTY Reactivity Insertion

The NEAMS Multiphysics Applications team continues to assess code usability and functionality for microreactor design and safety analyses, while demonstrating that NEAMS tools capture both steady-state and transient behavior across distinct microreactor concepts. In FY2025, the team advanced full-core, high-fidelity, multiphysics models that solve more complex problems and strengthen verification/validation for several microreactor systems: heat-pipe microreactor (HPMR), gas-cooled microreactor (GCMR), and the KRUSTY experiment. These models employ the MOOSE MultiApp/Transfers architecture with Griffin for neutronics, BISON for heat conduction/thermomechanics, Sockeye for heat pipes, SAM/THM for coolant channels and loops, and SWIFT for hydride behavior, with meshes generated via the MOOSE Reactor Module. The graphite models available in the Grizzly code were also investigated for future analyses. For the HPMR, a Na-HPMR variant was constructed to align with recently validated heat-pipe experiments and Sockeye’s LCVF capability, enabling mechanistic heat-pipe transients and startup modeling. The Na-HPMR will serve as the primary model for HPMR investigations in upcoming tasks. The load-following and single heat-pipe failure scenarios (Griffin/BISON/Sockeye), which were previously modeled for the K-HPMR, were replicated for the Na-HPMR, showing strong negative temperature feedback and highly localized thermal effects, respectively, while the startup case captured vapor-front progression and heat-removal activation. Solid mechanics was added to the previously built K-HPMR full-core model in BISON, showing minimal impact on steady-state reactivity yet enabling stress-field predictions that prepare the path for full-core TRISO performance analyses. For the GCMR, automated steady-state and four transient scenarios were executed using Griffin/BISON/SAM/SWIFT. Results confirm robust inherent safety: power collapses promptly in loss-of-cooling events, the inlet-temperature drop settles to a new equilibrium, and a single-channel blockage yields only a ~30 K local fuel-temperature rise with <0.4% power decrease. SWIFT-predicted hydrogen redistribution affects reactivity during both steady-state and transient conditions, underscoring its importance. A Brayton-cycle balance of plant (BOP) model in SAM/THM demonstrated stable startup behavior, and xenon-driven reactivity during load following was analyzed. To improve TRISO-compact temperature fidelity, a fast multiscale Heat Source Decomposition (HSD) treatment was implemented. Against heterogeneous benchmarks, HSD reduces underprediction of kernel temperatures and lowers predicted peak powers in reactivity-insertion transients compared to previous homogenized models. KRUSTY warm-critical validation progressed from FY2024 baselines: the 15Ȼ insertion shows excellent agreement in peak power (~2% high) and temperature trends, and the 30Ȼ case was automated via a feedback controller that maintained power near 3 kW for ~150 s with close agreement to data. The successful modeling of the warm critical tests has laid a strong foundation for simulating more complex nuclear system tests in the years ahead. Throughout FY2025, developer feedback was provided (e.g., MOOSE batch mesh generation, distributed pre-split meshes, Griffin sweeper on displaced meshes), several new models were contributed to the Virtual Test Bed, and an OECD-NEA WPRS multiphysics benchmark based on the HPMR was initiated to enable broader cross-comparison and best-practice development with the nuclear community at large.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Street-level temperature estimation using graph neural networks: Performance, feature embedding and interpretability

Estimating street-level air temperature is a challenging task due to the highly heterogeneous urban surfaces, canyon-like street morphology, and the diverse physical processes in the built environment. Though pioneering studies have embarked on investigations via data-driven approaches, many questions remain to be answered. Here, in this study, we leveraged an innovative framework and redefined the street-level temperature estimation problem using Graph Neural Networks (GNN) with spatial embedding techniques. The results showed that GNN models are more capable and consistent of estimating street-level temperature among tested locations, benefiting from its unique strength in handling extensive data over unstructured graph topology. In addition, we conducted in-depth analysis of feature importance to enhance the model interpretability. Among the urban features analyzed in this study, the time-variant canopy density and meter-level land use data emerge as crucial factors. Our findings highlight GNN 's high potential in capturing the complex dynamics between urban elements and their impacts on microclimate, thus offering valuable insights for comprehensive urban data collection and urban climate modeling in general. Collectively, this study also contributes to urban planning and policy by providing avenues to enhance city resilience against climate change, thereby advancing the agenda for environmental stewardship and urban sustainability.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Deep-learning methods for contrast enhancement and artifact reduction in cryo-electron tomography: a systematic analysis of the state of the art and proposed improvements

Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) has emerged as the preferred technique for visualizing the organization of macromolecular complexes in situ and resolving their structures at subnanometre resolution [Tegunov et al. (2021)View full citation, Nat. Methods, 18, 186–193]. Despite improvements in data quality as a result of advances in detector technology, microscope stability and stage precision, the analysis and interpretation of tomograms remains challenging due to a low signal-to-noise ratio and reconstruction artifacts stemming from experimental constraints in specimen tilt during data collection resulting in a missing wedge in the Fourier space. Recently, self-supervised deep-learning methods have been proposed for contrast enhancement and reduction of resolution anisotropy in reconstructed tomograms. Here, we evaluate several state-of-the-art deep-learning methods which aim to improve the interpretability of cryo-ET reconstructions, with a focus on their performance on downstream tasks of template matching, sub­tomogram averaging and segmentation. We propose new training architectures and a loss function based on Fourier shell correlation that show improved performance over the standard U-Net with L1/L2 losses. We demonstrate our analysis on four diverse experimental datasets: purified 80S ribosomes, in situ Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, immature HIV-1 virus-like particles and INS-1E cells.

contrast enhancement↗

Data Quality Monitoring for the Hadron Calorimeters Using Transfer Learning for Anomaly Detection

The proliferation of sensors brings an immense volume of spatio-temporal (ST) data in many domains, including monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics applications. Data curation is a time-consuming process for a large volume of data, making it challenging and expensive to deploy data analytics platforms in new environments. Transfer learning (TL) mechanisms promise to mitigate data sparsity and model complexity by utilizing pre-trained models for a new task. Despite the triumph of TL in fields like computer vision and natural language processing, efforts on complex ST models for anomaly detection (AD) applications are limited. In this study, we present the potential of TL within the context of high-dimensional ST AD with a hybrid autoencoder architecture, incorporating convolutional, graph, and recurrent neural networks. Motivated by the need for improved model accuracy and robustness, particularly in scenarios with limited training data on systems with thousands of sensors, this research investigates the transferability of models trained on different sections of the Hadron Calorimeter of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN. The key contributions of the study include exploring TL’s potential and limitations within the context of encoder and decoder networks, revealing insights into model initialization and training configurations that enhance performance while substantially reducing trainable parameters and mitigating data contamination effects.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Integrating Analytical Solutions and U-Net Model for Predicting Groundwater Contaminant Plumes in Pump-and-Treat Systems

Pump-and-treat (P&T) is a common technique for groundwater remediation involving the extraction and treatment of contaminated water above ground. Optimizing the design and operation of the P&T well network is essential for maximizing the system’s effectiveness and efficiency. However, this optimization often necessitates many model evaluations, leading to computationally demanding tasks. This study introduces a novel approach that integrates analytical solutions for groundwater dynamics with the U-Net (Ronneberger et al., 2015) deep learning framework to predict groundwater contaminant plume migration under dynamic pumping conditions. By incorporating the Thiem equation (Thiem, 1906) into the input preprocessing, the U-Net model transforms sparse well data into a continuous spatial field that captures the hydraulic impacts of pumping activities. This integration enables the model to leverage both deep learning capabilities and classical physics-based groundwater theories, enhancing prediction accuracy and computational efficiency. These advancements can facilitate rapid, large-scale evaluations of P&T optimization simulations, allowing for timely and effective decision-making in well placement and system management. We demonstrate the model's robust performance across both simplified transient 2D models and a more complex 3D heterogeneous site model at the 200 West P&T facility at the Hanford Site. The U-Net-based model offers substantial computational advantages, reducing simulation times significantly compared to full physics-based models and providing a powerful tool for rapid site evaluation and P&T system optimization, such as evaluating alternative P&T well network designs. Our findings highlight the potential of advanced machine learning models to significantly enhance the efficiency and sustainability of groundwater remediation efforts, offering a novel application of U-Net architecture in environmental science.

Pump-and-treat↗

Operator-level quantum acceleration of non-logconcave sampling

Sampling from probability distributions of the form 𝝈 ∝ e −𝜷V , where V is a continuous potential, is a fundamental task across physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, and statistics. However, when V is nonconvex, the resulting distribution becomes non-logconcave, and classical methods such as Langevin dynamics often exhibit poor performance. We introduce a quantum algorithm that provably accelerates a broad class of continuous-time sampling dynamics. For Langevin dynamics, our method encodes the target Gibbs measure into the amplitudes of aquantum state, identified as the kernel of a block matrix derived from a factorization of the Witten Laplacian operator. This connection enables Gibbs sampling via singular value thresholding and yields up to a quartic quantum speedup over best-knownclassical Langevin-based methods in the non-logconcave setting. Building on this framework, we further develop the first quantum algorithm that accelerates replica exchange Langevin diffusion, a widely used method for sampling from complex, rugged energy landscapes.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗