Samuel Jackson

Cécile Rousseau, Samuel Jackson, Rodrigo H. Ordonez-Hurtado et al.

Development and operation of commercially viable fusion energy reactors such as tokamaks require accurate predictions of plasma dynamics from sparse, noisy, and incomplete sensors readings. The complexity of the underlying physics and the heterogeneity of experimental data pose formidable challenges for conventional numerical methods, while simultaneously highlight the promise of modern data-native AI approaches. A major obstacle in realizing this potential is, however, the lack of curated, openly available datasets and standardized benchmarks. Existing fusion datasets are scarce, fragmented across institutions, facility-specific, and inconsistently annotated, which limits reproducibility and prevents a fair and scalable comparison of AI approaches. In this paper, we introduce TokaMark, a structured benchmark to evaluate AI models on real experimental data collected from the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST). TokaMark provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to (i) unify access to multi-modal heterogeneous fusion data, and (ii) harmonize formats, metadata, temporal alignment and evaluation protocols to enable consistent cross-model and cross-task comparisons. The benchmark includes a curated list of 14 tasks spanning a range of physical mechanisms, exploiting a variety of diagnostics and covering multiple operational use cases. A baseline model is provided to facilitate transparent comparison and validation within a unified framework. By establishing a unified benchmark for both the fusion and AI-for-science communities, TokaMark aims to accelerate progress in data-driven AI-based plasma modeling, contributing to the broader goal of achieving sustainable and stable fusion energy. The benchmark, documentation, and tooling will be fully open sourced upon acceptance to encourage community adoption and contribution.

Tobia Boschi, Andrea Loreti, Nicola C. Amorisco et al.

We present TokaMind, an open-source foundation model framework for fusion plasma modeling, based on a Multi-Modal Transformer (MMT) and trained on heterogeneous tokamak diagnostics from the publicly available MAST dataset. TokaMind supports multiple data modalities (time-series, 2D profiles, and videos) with different sampling rates, robust missing-signal handling, and efficient task adaptation via selectively loading and freezing four model components. To represent multi-modal signals, we use a training-free Discrete Cosine Transform embedding (DCT3D) and provide a clean interface for alternative embeddings (e.g., Variational Autoencoders - VAEs). We evaluate TokaMind on the recently introduced MAST benchmark TokaMark, comparing training and embedding strategies. Our results show that fine-tuned TokaMind outperforms the benchmark baseline on all but one task, and that, for several tasks, lightweight fine-tuning yields better performance than training the same architecture from scratch under a matched epoch budget. These findings highlight the benefits of multi-modal pretraining for tokamak plasma dynamics and provide a practical, extensible foundation for future fusion modeling tasks. Training code and model weights will be made publicly available.

Varshitha Chennamsetti, Gregor von Laszewski, Ruochen Gu et al.

In this paper, we report on work performed for the MLCommons Science Working Group on the cloud masking benchmark. MLCommons is a consortium that develops and maintains several scientific benchmarks that aim to benefit developments in AI. The benchmarks are conducted on the High Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters of New York University and University of Virginia, as well as a commodity desktop. We provide a description of the cloud masking benchmark, as well as a summary of our submission to MLCommons on the benchmark experiment we conducted. It includes a modification to the reference implementation of the cloud masking benchmark enabling early stopping. This benchmark is executed on the NYU HPC through a custom batch script that runs the various experiments through the batch queuing system while allowing for variation on the number of epochs trained. Our submission includes the modified code, a custom batch script to modify epochs, documentation, and the benchmark results. We report the highest accuracy (scientific metric) and the average time taken (performance metric) for training and inference that was achieved on NYU HPC Greene. We also provide a comparison of the compute capabilities between different systems by running the benchmark for one epoch. Our submission can be found in a Globus repository that is accessible to MLCommons Science Working Group.

Tony Hey, Keith Butler, Sam Jackson et al.

This paper reviews some of the challenges posed by the huge growth of experimental data generated by the new generation of large-scale experiments at UK national facilities at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory site at Harwell near Oxford. Such "Big Scientific Data" comes from the Diamond Light Source and Electron Microscopy Facilities, the ISIS Neutron and Muon Facility, and the UK's Central Laser Facility. Increasingly, scientists are now needing to use advanced machine learning and other AI technologies both to automate parts of the data pipeline and also to help find new scientific discoveries in the analysis of their data. For commercially important applications, such as object recognition, natural language processing and automatic translation, deep learning has made dramatic breakthroughs. Google's DeepMind has now also used deep learning technology to develop their AlphaFold tool to make predictions for protein folding. Remarkably, they have been able to achieve some spectacular results for this specific scientific problem. Can deep learning be similarly transformative for other scientific problems? After a brief review of some initial applications of machine learning at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, we focus on challenges and opportunities for AI in advancing materials science. Finally, we discuss the importance of developing some realistic machine learning benchmarks using Big Scientific Data coming from a number of different scientific domains. We conclude with some initial examples of our "SciML" benchmark suite and of the research challenges these benchmarks will enable.