Azarakhsh Jalalvand

Nathaniel Chen, Kouroche Bouchiat, Peter Steiner et al.

Next-generation fusion facilities like ITER face a "data deluge," generating petabytes of multi-diagnostic signals daily that challenge manual analysis. We present a "signals-first" self-supervised framework for the automated extraction of coherent and transient modes from high-noise time-frequency data. We also develop a general-purpose method and tool for extracting coherent, quasi-coherent, and transient modes for fluctuation measurements in tokamaks by employing non-linear optimal techniques in multichannel signal processing with a fast neural network surrogate on fast magnetics, electron cyclotron emission, CO2 interferometers, and beam emission spectroscopy measurements from DIII-D. Results are tested on data from DIII-D, TJ-II, and non-fusion spectrograms. With an inference latency of 0.5 seconds, this framework enables real-time mode identification and large-scale automated database generation for advanced plasma control. Repository is in https://github.com/PlasmaControl/TokEye.

Azarakhsh Jalalvand, SangKyeun Kim, Jaemin Seo et al.

A non-linear system governed by multi-spatial and multi-temporal physics scales cannot be fully understood with a single diagnostic, as each provides only a partial view, leading to information loss. Combining multiple diagnostics may also result in incomplete projections of the system's physics. By identifying hidden inter-correlations between diagnostics, we can leverage mutual support to fill in these gaps, but uncovering such correlations analytically is too complex. We introduce a machine learning methodology to address this issue. Unlike traditional methods, our multimodal approach does not rely on the target diagnostic's direct measurements to generate its super-resolution version. Instead, it uses other diagnostics to produce super-resolution data, capturing detailed structural evolution and responses to perturbations previously unobservable. This not only enhances the resolution of a diagnostic for deeper insights but also reconstructs the target diagnostic, providing a valuable tool to mitigate diagnostic failure. This methodology addresses a key challenge in fusion plasmas: the Edge Localized Mode (ELM), a plasma instability that can cause significant erosion of plasma-facing materials. A method to stabilize ELM is using resonant magnetic perturbation (RMP) to trigger magnetic islands. However, limited spatial and temporal resolution restricts analysis of these islands due to their small size, rapid dynamics, and complex plasma interactions. With super-resolution diagnostics, we can experimentally verify theoretical models of magnetic islands for the first time, providing insights into their role in ELM stabilization. This advancement supports the development of effective ELM suppression strategies for future fusion reactors like ITER and has broader applications, potentially revolutionizing diagnostics in fields such as astronomy, astrophysics, and medical imaging.

Peter Steiner, Azarakhsh Jalalvand, Simon Stone et al.

Reservoir Computing Networks (RCNs) belong to a group of machine learning techniques that project the input space non-linearly into a high-dimensional feature space, where the underlying task can be solved linearly. Popular variants of RCNs are capable of solving complex tasks equivalently to widely used deep neural networks, but with a substantially simpler training paradigm based on linear regression. In this paper, we show how to uniformly describe RCNs with small and clearly defined building blocks, and we introduce the Python toolbox PyRCN (Python Reservoir Computing Networks) for optimizing, training and analyzing RCNs on arbitrarily large datasets. The tool is based on widely-used scientific packages and complies with the scikit-learn interface specification. It provides a platform for educational and exploratory analyses of RCNs, as well as a framework to apply RCNs on complex tasks including sequence processing. With a small number of building blocks, the framework allows the implementation of numerous different RCN architectures. We provide code examples on how to set up RCNs for time series prediction and for sequence classification tasks. PyRCN is around ten times faster than reference toolboxes on a benchmark task while requiring substantially less boilerplate code.

Peter Steiner, Azarakhsh Jalalvand, Peter Birkholz

Echo State Networks (ESNs) are a special type of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), in which the input and recurrent connections are traditionally generated randomly, and only the output weights are trained. Despite the recent success of ESNs in various tasks of audio, image and radar recognition, we postulate that a purely random initialization is not the ideal way of initializing ESNs. The aim of this work is to propose an unsupervised initialization of the input connections using the $K$-Means algorithm on the training data. We show that for a large variety of datasets this initialization performs equivalently or superior than a randomly initialized ESN whilst needing significantly less reservoir neurons. Furthermore, we discuss that this approach provides the opportunity to estimate a suitable size of the reservoir based on prior knowledge about the data.

Utku Ozbulak, Baptist Vandersmissen, Azarakhsh Jalalvand et al.

Given their substantial success in addressing a wide range of computer vision challenges, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are increasingly being used in smart home applications, with many of these applications relying on the automatic recognition of human activities. In this context, low-power radar devices have recently gained in popularity as recording sensors, given that the usage of these devices allows mitigating a number of privacy concerns, a key issue when making use of conventional video cameras. Another concern that is often cited when designing smart home applications is the resilience of these applications against cyberattacks. It is, for instance, well-known that the combination of images and CNNs is vulnerable against adversarial examples, mischievous data points that force machine learning models to generate wrong classifications during testing time. In this paper, we investigate the vulnerability of radar-based CNNs to adversarial attacks, and where these radar-based CNNs have been designed to recognize human gestures. Through experiments with four unique threat models, we show that radar-based CNNs are susceptible to both white- and black-box adversarial attacks. We also expose the existence of an extreme adversarial attack case, where it is possible to change the prediction made by the radar-based CNNs by only perturbing the padding of the inputs, without touching the frames where the action itself occurs. Moreover, we observe that gradient-based attacks exercise perturbation not randomly, but on important features of the input data. We highlight these important features by making use of Grad-CAM, a popular neural network interpretability method, hereby showing the connection between adversarial perturbation and prediction interpretability.