Hierarchical Multi-to-Single-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Disruption Prediction in EASTQiang Chen, Xiao Wang, Hao Si et al.
Plasma disruption is a critical threat to tokamak safety. Existing data-driven predictors mainly rely on time-series diagnostic signals, while visible images provide complementary spatial cues including plasma deformation, local brightening, and radiation-structure evolution. Although the image modality improves the model's discriminative capability, it also substantially increases the computational cost during inference. To address this issue, we propose a hierarchical multi-to-single-modal knowledge distillation framework for disruption prediction on a synchronized EAST multimodal dataset. During training, visible images and time-series signals are used to train a multimodal teacher, which learns disruption precursor representations through Transformer-based encoders and a prototype-guided spatiotemporal hypergraph module. During inference, only the time-series student is retained, with multimodal knowledge transferred through graph-structure-level, representation-level, and decision-level distillation. On the 640-discharge EAST dataset, the results demonstrate that the proposed framework can preserve the discriminative advantages of multimodal learning while substantially reducing inference cost, and providing an effective route for efficient disruption prediction in EAST. The source code of this paper will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenFusion.
10.7LGJul 2
Less Tokens, Better Forecasts: Sparse Residual Routing for Efficient Weather PredictionJanet Wang, Yunbei Zhang, Lin Zhao et al.
Existing ViT-based weather forecasting models apply uniform computation across all spatial tokens, even though nearby atmospheric grid points often contain similar values and large regions evolve smoothly over time. This makes much of the intermediate per-token computation redundant. Standard token-efficiency methods, such as pruning or merging, reduce cost by removing or fusing tokens. However, weather forecasting is a spatiotemporal dense prediction problem in which a history of atmospheric states must be mapped to future values on the original latitude-longitude grid. Thus, every grid cell must retain a physically meaningful representation, especially under autoregressive rollout. We introduce Sparse-Reslim, a parameter-free plug-in routing module that makes sparse token processing compatible with this fixed-grid requirement. Sparse-Reslim routes only 25% of spatial tokens through the expensive middle transformer blocks and treats those blocks as residual updates: it computes the change produced for the routed tokens and scatters only this delta back to the full sequence. Unselected tokens keep their pre-routing representations exactly, so no grid cell is dropped or replaced by a mask token, and no fusion layer or additional parameters are introduced. Across ERA5 resolutions up to the operational 0.25\textdegree{} standard and two model families, a deterministic Transformer and a diffusion model, Sparse-Reslim improves forecast accuracy on every evaluated variable while substantially reducing cost: training is about 2.5x faster in the main settings and reaches 3.18x speedup at 0.25\textdegree{}, with over 2.2x lower peak memory. A controlled decomposition shows that the accuracy gain comes primarily from sparse routing itself, while random token selection provides an additional regularization benefit without selector overhead.