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At least 145 records · Page 8

Probabilistic predictions and uncertainty estimation for radiological and nuclear effects modeling

Better characterization of meteorological uncertainty is needed to predict the effects of radiological and nuclear releases in the atmosphere. Multi-physics ensembles of atmospheric simulations can estimate uncertainty of physical processes, but they are often limited for computational reasons. Because weather uncertainty is important for emergency response applications, but the conventional way of running multi-physics ensembles is infeasible, we have developed new machine learning-based methods that quickly estimate and identify key sources of meteorological uncertainty. Machine learning accelerates the analysis of weather uncertainty by iteratively learning about model physics options that affect plume predictions. We have demonstrated the power of machine learning by creating a large multi-physics weather and dispersion ensemble dataset containing 1,200 simulations for two hypothetical radiological release scenarios. By training on less than 10% of the ensemble, we can quickly and accurately predict different outcomes, including the mass of radiological material deposited and spatial distribution and extent of contaminated areas.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Scalable statistical inference of photometric redshift via data subsampling

Handling big data has largely been a major bottleneck in traditional statistical models. Consequently, when accurate point prediction is the primary target, machine learning models are often preferred over their statistical counterparts for bigger problems. But full probabilistic statistical models often outperform other models in quantifying uncertainties associated with model predictions. We develop a data-driven statistical modeling framework that combines the uncertainties from an ensemble of statistical models learned on smaller subsets of data carefully chosen to account for imbalances in the input space. We demonstrate this method on a photometric redshift estimation problem in cosmology, which seeks to infer a distribution of the redshift—the stretching effect in observing the light of far-away galaxies—given multivariate color information observed for an object in the sky. Our proposed method performs balanced partitioning, graph-based data subsampling across the partitions, and training of an ensemble of Gaussian process models.

data subsampling↗

NaroNet: Discovery of tumor microenvironment elements from highly multiplexed images

Understanding the spatial interactions between the elements of the tumor microenvironment -i.e. tumor cells. fibroblasts, immune cells- and how these interactions relate to the diagnosis or prognosis of a tumor is one of the goals of computational pathology. We present NaroNet, a deep learning framework that models the multi-scale tumor microenvironment from multiplex-stained cancer tissue images and provides patient-level interpretable predictions using a seamless end-to-end learning pipeline. Trained only with multiplex-stained tissue images and their corresponding patient-level clinical labels, NaroNet unsupervisedly learns which cell phenotypes, cell neighborhoods, and neighborhood interactions have the highest influence to predict the correct label. To this end, NaroNet incorporates several novel and state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, such as patch-level contrastive learning, multi-level graph embeddings, a novel max-sum pooling operation, or a metric that quantifies the relevance that each microenvironment element has in the individual predictions. We validate NaroNet using synthetic data simulating multiplex-immunostained images where a patient label is artificially associated to the -adjustable- probabilistic incidence of different microenvironment elements. We then apply our model to two sets of images of human cancer tissues: 336 seven-color multiplex-immunostained images from 12 high-grade endometrial cancer patients; and 382 35-plex mass cytometry images from 215 breast cancer patients. In both synthetic and real datasets, NaroNet provides outstanding predictions of relevant clinical information while associating those predictions to the presence of specific microenvironment elements.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

A Probabilistic Approach To Selecting Build Configurations in Package Managers

In the past decade software has grown significantly in complexity and scale. Likewise the number of dependencies for most software has increased with typical software packages depending on tens to hundreds of other packages. Such large numbers of dependencies place a significant burden on package managers to correctly maintain dependency lists and constraints between them. Due to this package managers have incorporated sophisticated tooling such as SAT solvers into their dependency management mechanisms. Despite these tools package managers still rely on many human annotated constraints for dependency and version selection. These are error-prone and require a significant amount of labor to constantly update and test. In this paper we propose a methodology to make use of historical build results in selecting the version for package dependencies. Our method utilizes the flexibility of the Spack package manager’s heavily parameterized package configurations to incorporate a machine learning model trained to predict the probability of build outcomes. This work is able to build and install packages with a 13% higher success rate than the default version selection mechanism in Spack.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Probabilistic Inference of Low-Surface-Brightness Galaxy Morphological Parameters Using Simulation-Based Inference

Low-surface-brightness galaxies (LSBGs) are diffuse, often dark-matter-dominated systems whose faintness makes their structural parameters difficult to measure reliably in wide-field imaging surveys. Robust parameter inference, including uncertainty quantification, is important for population studies and for comparisons with models of galaxy formation, as future surveys are expected to produce increasingly large samples of diffuse galaxies. In practice, LSBG profile modeling is sensitive to sky- background errors, masking choices, contaminating background sources, and the computational cost of obtaining posterior-level uncertainties for large samples. Motivated by these questions, we develop a simulation-based inference (SBI) framework for estimating posterior distributions of LSBG morphological parameters from simulated galaxy images. Using PyImfit, we generate DES-like single-Sersic profile LSBG images with known position angle, ellipticity, Sersic index, effective surface brightness, and effective radius. We then train a normalizing-flow-based neural posterior estimator using the sbi package to infer these parameters from the simulated images. For isolated simulated galaxies, the SBI posterior recovers the true input parameters, produces posterior predictive residuals consistent with the assumed noise model, and shows good empirical calibration in a DES-motivated test regime. We also compare SBI with PyImfit-based MCMC inference and find broadly comparable posterior constraints, while SBI enables substantially faster posterior sampling after training. Finally, we test robustness to compact background contaminants. A model trained only on isolated galaxies produces undercovered posteriors on contaminated images, whereas training on simulations with variable contaminant positions and fluxes improves calibration across contaminated test sets. These results demonstrate the promise of SBI for scalable, uncertainty-aware LSBG morphology inference, while emphasizing that posterior reliability strongly depends on whether training simulations include relevant observational complications.

Batbayar, Bilguun [U. Chicago (main)]↗

Data-driven projection pursuit adaptation of polynomial chaos expansions for dependent high-dimensional parameters

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) and inference involving a large number of parameters are valuable tools for problems associated with heterogeneous and non-stationary behaviors. The difficulty with these problems is exacerbated when these parameters are statistically dependent requiring statistical characterization over joint measures. Probabilistic modeling methodologies stand as effective tools in the realms of UQ and inference. Among these, polynomial chaos expansions (PCE), when adapted to low-dimensional quantities of interest (QoI), provide effective yet accurate approximations for these QoI in terms of an adapted orthogonal basis. These adaptation techniques have been cast as projection pursuits in Gaussian Hilbert space in what has been referred to as a projection pursuit adaptation (PPA) by Xiaoshu Zeng and Roger Ghanem (2023). The PPA method efficiently identifies an optimal low-dimensional space for representing the QoI and simultaneously evaluates an optimal PCE within that space. The quality of this approximation clearly depends on the size of the training dataset, which is typically a function of the adapted reduced dimension. Here, the complexity of the problem is thus mediated by the complexity of the low-dimensional quantity of interest and not the complexity of the high-dimensional parameter space.

Data-driven↗

Reinforcement Learning via Gaussian Processes with Neural Network Dual Kernels

While deep neural networks (DNNs) and Gaussian Processes (GPs) are both popularly utilized to solve problems in reinforcement learning, both approaches feature undesirable drawbacks for challenging problems. DNNs learn complex non-linear embeddings, but do not naturally quantify uncertainty and are often data-inefficient to train. GPs infer posterior distributions over functions, but popular kernels exhibit limited expressivity on complex and high-dimensional data. Fortunately, recently discovered conjugate and neural tangent kernel functions encode the behavior of overparameterized neural networks in the kernel domain. We demonstrate that these kernels can be efficiently applied to regression and reinforcement learning problems by analyzing a baseline case study.We apply GPs with neural network dual kernels to solve reinforcement learning tasks for the first time. We demonstrate, using the well understood mountain-car problem, that GPs empowered with dual kernels perform at least as well as those using the conventional radial basis function kernel. Finally, we conjecture that by inheriting the probabilistic rigor of GPs and the powerful embedding properties of DNNs, GPs using NN dual kernels will empower future reinforcement learning models on difficult domains.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Earthquake Phase Association Using a Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model

Earthquake phase association algorithms aggregate picked seismic phases from a network of seismometers into individual seismic events and play an important role in earthquake monitoring and research. Dense seismic networks and improved phase picking methods produce massive seismic phase datasets, particularly for earthquake swarms and aftershocks occurring closely in time and space, making phase association a challenging problem. Here, we present a new association method, the Gaussian Mixture Model Association (GaMMA), that combines the Gaussian mixture model with earthquake location, origin time, and magnitude estimation. We treat earthquake phase association as an unsupervised clustering problem in a probabilistic framework, where each earthquake corresponds to a cluster of P and S phases with a hyperbolic moveout of arrival times and a decay of amplitude with distance. We use the multivariate Gaussian distribution to model the collection of phase picks of an event; and the mean of the multivariate Gaussian distribution is given by the predicted arrival time and amplitude from the causative event. We carry out the pick assignment to each earthquake and determine earthquake source parameters (i.e., earthquake location, origin time, and magnitude) under the maximum likelihood criterion using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm. The GaMMA method does not require typical association steps of other algorithms, such as grid-search or supervised training. The results for both synthetic tests and for the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence show that GaMMA effectively associates phases from a temporally and spatially dense earthquake sequence while producing useful estimates of earthquake location and magnitude.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Solving high-dimensional inverse problems using amortized likelihood-free inference with noisy and incomplete data

Here, we present a likelihood-free probabilistic inversion method based on normalizing flows for high-dimensional inverse problems. The proposed method is composed of two complementary networks: a summary network for data compression and an inference network for parameter estimation. The summary network encodes raw observations into a fixed-size vector of summary features, while the inference network generates samples of the approximate posterior distribution of the model parameters based on these summary features. The posterior samples are produced in a deep generative fashion by sampling from a latent Gaussian distribution and passing these samples through an invertible transformation. We construct this invertible transformation by sequentially alternating conditional invertible neural network and conditional neural spline flow layers. The summary and inference networks are trained simultaneously. We apply the proposed method to an inversion problem in groundwater hydrology to estimate the posterior distribution of the log-conductivity field conditioned on spatially sparse time-series observations of the system’s hydraulic head responses. The conductivity field is represented with 706 degrees of freedom in the considered problem. Comparison with the likelihood-based iterative ensemble smoother PEST-IES method demonstrates that the proposed method accurately estimates the parameter posterior distribution and the observations’ predictive posterior distribution at a fraction of the inference time of PEST-IES.

conditional invertible neural network↗

COVID-19 dynamics across the US: A deep learning study of human mobility and social behavior

This paper presents a deep learning framework for epidemiology system identification from noisy and sparse observations with quantified uncertainty. The proposed approach employs an ensemble of deep neural networks to infer the time-dependent reproduction number of an infectious disease by formulating a tensor-based multi-step loss function that allows us to efficiently calibrate the model on multiple observed trajectories. The method is applied to a mobility and social behavior-based SEIR model of COVID-19 spread. The model is trained on Google and Unacast mobility data spanning a period of 66 days, and is able to yield accurate future forecasts of COVID-19 spread in 203 US counties within a time-window of 15 days. Interestingly, a sensitivity analysis that assesses the importance of different mobility and social behavior parameters reveals that attendance of close places, including workplaces, residential, and retail and recreational locations, has the largest impact on the effective reproduction number. Furthermore, the model enables us to rapidly probe and quantify the effects of government interventions, such as lock-down and re-opening strategies. Taken together, the proposed framework provides a robust workflow for data-driven epidemiology model discovery under uncertainty and produces probabilistic forecasts for the evolution of a pandemic that can judiciously provide information for policy and decision making. All codes and data accompanying this manuscript are available at https://github.com/PredictiveIntelligenceLab/DeepCOVID19.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

EFIT-Prime: Probabilistic and physics-constrained reduced-order neural network model for equilibrium reconstruction in DIII-D

We introduce EFIT-Prime, a novel machine learning surrogate model for EFIT (Equilibrium FIT) that integrates probabilistic and physics-informed methodologies to overcome typical limitations associated with deterministic and ad hoc neural network architectures. EFIT-Prime utilizes a neural architecture search-based deep ensemble for robust uncertainty quantification, providing scalable and efficient neural architectures that comprehensively quantify both data and model uncertainties. Physically informed by the Grad–Shafranov equation, EFIT-Prime applies a constraint on the current density J tor and a smoothness constraint on the first derivative of the poloidal flux, ensuring physically plausible solutions. Furthermore, the spatial location of the diagnostics is explicitly incorporated in the inputs to account for their spatial correlation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate EFIT-Prime's accuracy and robustness across diverse scenarios, most notably showing good generalization on negative-triangularity discharges that were excluded from training. Timing studies indicate an ensemble inference time of 15 ms for predicting a new equilibrium, offering the possibility of plasma control in real-time, if the model is optimized for speed.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

A data-driven method for modelling dissipation rates in stratified turbulence

We present a deep probabilistic convolutional neural network (PCNN) model for predicting local values of small-scale mixing properties in stratified turbulent flows, namely the dissipation rates of turbulent kinetic energy and density variance, $\varepsilon$ and $\chi$ . Inputs to the PCNN are vertical columns of velocity and density gradients, motivated by data typically available from microstructure profilers in the ocean. The architecture is designed to enable the model to capture several characteristic features of stratified turbulence, in particular the dependence of small-scale isotropy on the buoyancy Reynolds number $Re_b:=\varepsilon /(\nu N^2)$ , where $\nu$ is the kinematic viscosity and $N$ is the background buoyancy frequency, the correlation between suitably locally averaged density gradients and turbulence intensity and the importance of capturing the tails of the probability distribution functions of values of dissipation. Empirically modified versions of commonly used isotropic models for $\varepsilon$ and $\chi$ that depend only on vertical derivatives of density and velocity are proposed based on the asymptotic regimes $Re_b\ll 1$ and $Re_b\gg 1$ , and serve as an instructive benchmark for comparison with the data-driven approach. When trained and tested on a simulation of stratified decaying turbulence which accesses a range of turbulent regimes (associated with differing values of $Re_b$ ), the PCNN outperforms assumptions of isotropy significantly as $Re_b$ decreases, and additionally demonstrates improvements over the fitted empirical models. A differential sensitivity analysis of the PCNN facilitates a comparison with the theoretical models and provides a physical interpretation of the features enabling it to make improved predictions.

42 ENGINEERING↗

MOOSE ProbML: Parallelizable Probabilistic Machine Learning and Uncertainty Quantification Capabilities

The Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) is a widely used open- source finite element software for performing multiphysics multiscale simulations in a massively parallel fashion. Recently, the computational team at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has implemented Probabilistic Machine Learning (ProbML) capabilities in MOOSE—in a parallelized fashion—and enable active learning with large-scale computational models for tasks such as surrogate model development, scale bridging, forward/inverse uncertainty quantification (UQ), Bayesian optimization, etc. This presentation summarizes these developments in MOOSE along with demonstrations on several real applications relevant to nuclear energy. At the fundamental level, samplers like Monte Carlo/Latin Hypercube, variance reduction, parallelized Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) support uncertainty propagation in both forward and inverse settings. These samplers can be integrated with the Gaussian processes (GP) suite in MOOSE, which offer several variants like scalar GPs, multi-output GPs, and deep GPs, to enable active learning. These GPs can be tuned using gradient-based optimization methods like Adam and its variants or gradient-free methods like the elliptical slice sampler (a variant of MCMC adept under Gaussian settings) for more complex covariance kernels or likelihoods whose gradient computations can be cumbersome. A variety of batch acquisition functions permit parallelized evaluation of the computational model and support different learning objectives with high efficiency like Bayesian inference, global surrogate development, optimization, etc. Furthermore, libtorch integration supports training, evaluation, and re-training of neural networks and other complex machine learning models in active learning settings. The impacts of these developments are shown on several real applications: (1) nuclear fuel inverse UQ and model inadequacy assessment using the Kennedy O’Hagan framework; (2) uncertainty aware surrogate modeling for additive manufacturing to predict field quantities; (3) nuclear reactor rare events analysis; and (4) complex fluid flow prediction using a global surrogate with quantified prediction uncertainty. Finally, the outlook of MOOSE ProbML is discussed for both outer-loop and inner-loop computations in the broad view to accelerate fuels and materials qualification, address gaps in knowledge and data, and assess new reactor/fuel systems.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

A hybrid deep neural operator/finite element method for ice-sheet modeling

One of the most challenging and consequential problems in climate modeling is to provide probabilistic projections of sea level rise. A large part of the uncertainty of sea level projections is due to uncertainty in ice sheet dynamics. At the moment, accurate quantification of the uncertainty is hindered by the cost of ice sheet computational models. In this work we develop a hybrid approach to approximate existing ice sheet models at a fraction of their cost. Our approach consists of replacing the finite element model for the momentum equations for the ice velocity, the most expensive part of an ice sheet model, with a Deep Operator Network, while we retain a classic finite element discretization for the evolution of the ice thickness. We show that the resulting hybrid model is very accurate and it is an order of magnitude faster than the traditional finite element model. Further, a distinctive feature of the proposed model, compared to other neural network approaches, is that it can handle high-dimensional parameter spaces (parameter fields) such as the basal friction at the bed of the glacier and can therefore be used for generating samples for uncertainty quantification. Further, we study the impact of hyper-parameters, number of unknowns and correlation length of the parameter distribution on the training and accuracy of the Deep Operator Network on a synthetic ice sheet model. We then target the evolution of the Humboldt glacier in Greenland and show that our hybrid model can provide accurate statistics of the glacier mass loss and can be effectively used to accelerate the quantification of uncertainty.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Realistic galaxy image simulation via score-based generative models

ABSTRACT We show that a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM), a class of score-based generative model, can be used to produce realistic mock images that mimic observations of galaxies. Our method is tested with Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) grz imaging of galaxies from the Photometry and Rotation curve OBservations from Extragalactic Surveys (PROBES) sample and galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Subjectively, the generated galaxies are highly realistic when compared with samples from the real data set. We quantify the similarity by borrowing from the deep generative learning literature, using the ‘Fréchet inception distance’ to test for subjective and morphological similarity. We also introduce the ‘synthetic galaxy distance’ metric to compare the emergent physical properties (such as total magnitude, colour, and half-light radius) of a ground truth parent and synthesized child data set. We argue that the DDPM approach produces sharper and more realistic images than other generative methods such as adversarial networks (with the downside of more costly inference), and could be used to produce large samples of synthetic observations tailored to a specific imaging survey. We demonstrate two potential uses of the DDPM: (1) accurate inpainting of occluded data, such as satellite trails, and (2) domain transfer, where new input images can be processed to mimic the properties of the DDPM training set. Here we ‘DESI-fy’ cartoon images as a proof of concept for domain transfer. Finally, we suggest potential applications for score-based approaches that could motivate further research on this topic within the astronomical community.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

CAHS: Context-Aware Homology Search

Protein homology search is foundational to bioinformatics: it supports annotation transfer, structure/function inference, and evolutionary analysis over rapidly expanding sequence repositories (e.g., UniProtKB). Profile hidden Markov models (pHMMs), as implemented in HMMER, remain the most widely trusted approach because they provide statistically calibrated E-values; however, their gap behavior is fixed once a profile is trained, despite biological evidence that insertion/deletion tolerance varies across flexible loops and intrinsically disordered regions. We present CAHS (Context-Aware Homology Search), a lightweight query-time adapter for pHMM search that incorporates learned and biologically motivated signals without changing HMMER's downstream search pipeline or its calibrated E-value reporting. Given a query sequence, CAHS computes per-residue representations from a protein language model and a disorder predictor, maps these to profile coordinates, and modulates only match-state transition rows (gap-open and gap-extension probabilities) while preserving Plan7 constraints. We comprehensively evaluate CAHS across six structurally diverse protein families and multi-domain architectures against a 570k-sequence target corpus. CAHS expands detection capability, retrieving thousands of additional remote homologs at relaxed thresholds by maintaining alignment quality through flexible regions. For multi-domain proteins, context-aware modulation resolves 94% of fragmented alignments. Crucially, CAHS preserves hit-set invariance at stringent operating points (E<10-10), demonstrating increased statistical confidence without inflating false positives. Furthermore, sharper statistical distinction between homologs and background noise during early filter stages yields up to a 3.87× acceleration in end-to-end wall-clock time on high-performance computing clusters. Overall, CAHS illustrates a practical AI-for-science design pattern: augmenting a trusted probabilistic model with query-specific learned signals to improve interpretable, reproducible inference in data-rich biology.

Bhattaram, Swethasree [Georgia Institute of Techno↗

Multidimensional Distributional Neural Network Output Demonstrated in Super‐Resolution of Surface Wind Speed

Accurate quantification of uncertainty in neural network predictions remains a central challenge for scientific applications involving high-dimensional, correlated data. While existing methods capture either aleatoric or epistemic uncertainty, few offer closed-form, multidimensional distributions that preserve spatial correlation while remaining computationally tractable. In this work, we present a framework for training neural networks with a multidimensional Gaussian loss, generating a closed-form predictive distribution over outputs informed by non-identically distributed training data. Our approach captures aleatoric uncertainty by iteratively estimating the means and covariance matrices, and is demonstrated on a super-resolution example out-of-training-sample. We leverage a Fourier representation of the covariance matrix to stabilize network training and preserve spatial correlation. We introduce a novel regularization strategy—referred to as information sharing—that interpolates between image-specific and global covariance estimates, enabling convergence of the super-resolution downscaling network trained on image-specific distributional loss functions. This framework allows for efficient sampling, explicit correlation modeling, and extensions to more complex distribution families all without disrupting prediction performance. We demonstrate the method on a surface wind speed downscaling task and discuss its broader applicability to uncertainty-aware prediction in scientific models.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Important Human Actions for Advanced Reactors: Implications for Human Factors

As advanced reactor platforms continue to develop and gain traction in the energy sector there is a need for risk-informed, scalable regulations that match that progress. This is a core component of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s proposed Part 53 Rule Making; the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act; and other efforts that seek to update nuclear power regulations. This paper covers one key aspect of that regulatory evolution: Important Human Actions (IHA). In this paper, we discuss how the understanding and definitions of IHAs have changed and what that means for human factors engagement through the process of developing these technologies. Instead of a narrow focus on control actions that led to an increase in core damage risk, the new focus is on IHAs is “wherever they occur.” What this means is that having a highly automated or passive safety system does not eliminate IHAs. Rather, it shifts the focus point to all the actions that enable these systems. Everything from maintenance, to design, to training can be considered an IHA and that dramatically shifts the efforts and level of engagement necessary for human factors to enable these technologies. We discuss the notions of risk-informed human factors that underpin these efforts, give several examples, and briefly describe the risk assessment methodologies that will be needed. In the past, IHAs were identified and then became a focus point of human factors engineering (HFE) activities to ensure a robust evaluation of the task was completed. The future is less clear. HFE for nuclear energy will need to evolve and become more integrated in technology development than ever before.

22 - GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗