TokEye: Fast Signal Extraction for Fluctuating Time Series via Offline Self-Supervised Learning From Fusion Diagnostics to Bioacoustics
Authors: Nathaniel Chen, Kouroche Bouchiat, Peter Steiner, Andrew Rothstein, David Smith, Max Austin, Mike van Zeeland, Azarakhsh Jalalvand, Egemen Kolemen
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 across a variety of sensors. 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.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Signal taxonomy with example modes and spectra.
Figure 2: Signal processing pipeline for ECE shot 178631 demonstrating progressive separation of coherent modes from broadband background and stochastic noise. (left) Raw STFT power spectra. (center) Welch periodogram, which is the time averaged spectrogram. (right) Thresholding on power spectra.
Figure 3: (left) Averaging signals can introduce a bias that removes information about each individual signal. (right) Reconstructing each channel with the information from all other channels leads to a better estimate of the true signal.
Figure 4: Blind-spot denoising example with AT-BSN, a more efficient form of AP-BSN. (top) Original spectra with small kernel. (bottom) denoised spectra with large kernel. Although noise is reduced in both cases, the small kernel method still retains largely observable measurements of noise, while the large kernel method removes fluctuations especially at the top.
Figure 5: (Top) Original denoised spectra. (Middle) CDF with threshold set at corner. (Bottom) Thresholded spectra.
Figure 6: The automated data extraction pipeline and surrogate model training process. For real-time usage, the surrogate model can automatically extract vertical and coherent observations from signals.
Figure 7: U-Net architecture used for all three models in this paper. For self-supervised training, the input and output are multichannel depending on the number of samples used. For robust label expansion, the input and output is one single channel. For surrogate model training, the input is single channel and the output is two channel for binary segmentation.
Figure 8: (top) example magnetic spectrogram for shot 170008 with only coherent mode extraction. (middle) individually extracted events using a model threshold. (bottom) gated spectrogram, which captures amplitudes of interest. transient events here can be filtered out, allowing direct coherent mode extraction.
Lbl
fmin
fmax
tmin
tmax
Amp.
(kHz)
(kHz)
(ms)
(ms)
(dB)
1
7
68
183
4096
5335
3
28
96
376
2358
546
21
99
172
1295
1796
42
4
32
95
2318
2988
1026
46
264
301
1137
1316
32
Table 1: Database of detected signal regions.
Figure 9: (top) example CO 2 density spectrogram for shot 185781. (middle) the individually extracted events using a model threshold. (bottom) gated spectrogram, which captures amplitudes of interest. Different events including alfven-like and low frequency modes can be captured, along with very fine chirping structures.
Figure 10: (top) ECE spectrogram segmentation in a tearing mode shot 199597. (middle) individually extracted events using a model threshold. (bottom) gated spectrogram, which captures amplitudes of interest. high frequency modes appear starting at 2 seconds, rapidly ending near 3.4 seconds when tearing mode occurs.
Figure 11: (top) ECE spectrogram segmentation in a tearing-suppressed shot 199607. (middle) individually extracted events using a model threshold. (bottom) gated spectrogram, which captures amplitudes of interest. high frequency modes appear starting at 2 seconds, and do not diminish as tearing mode is suppressed.
Figure 12: Example of TJ-II ECE spectrogram with expert annotations and model output. The threshold used here is the recommended 50% threshold.
Figure 13: Example of DCLDE 2011 dolphin call spectrogram with expert annotations (top) and model output (bottom) at the recommended 50% threshold.
Figure 14: Example of DCLDE 2011 with missed overlap. While the general segmentation region is in the correct vicinity, there are only three pixels of overlap between annotation and model output.
We present TokaMind, to our knowledge the first open-source foundation model for tokamak plasma dynamics, based on a Multi-Modal Transformer (MMT) and pretrained on heterogeneous 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 lightweight fixed-basis Discrete Cosine Transform embedding (DCT3D) and provide a clean interface for alternative embeddings (e.g., Variational Autoencoders). We evaluate TokaMind on the recently introduced MAST benchmark TokaMark, which comprises 14 tasks with heterogeneous reconstruction and forecasting objectives. Our results show that fine-tuned TokaMind outperforms the strongest benchmark baseline on all but one task. Compared with training the same architecture from scratch under a matched epoch budget, warm-start adaptation is most beneficial on demanding downstream settings, including long-horizon forecasting and high-dimensional equilibrium objectives. These findings highlight the value of multi-modal pretraining for tokamak plasma dynamics and provide a practical, extensible foundation for future fusion modeling tasks. Training code and model weights are publicly available at github.com/UKAEA-IBM-STFC-Fusion-FMs/tokamind and huggingface.co/UKAEA-IBM-STFC, respectively.
Tobia Boschi, Andrea Loreti, Nicola C. Amorisco +13
IBM Research Dublin, Ireland · UK Atomic Energy Authority Abingdon, UK · STFC Hartree Centre Daresbury, UK
Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) based on air-plasma generation and balanced air-biased coherent detection offers gap-free broadband coverage, but individual continuous-scan traces are strongly affected by pulse-to-pulse fluctuations and electronic noise. Reaching a useful signal-to-noise ratio therefore requires averaging multiple traces, which directly increases measurement time. We propose a learned denoising approach that recovers high-quality THz waveforms from as few as one complete continuous delay sweep, referred to here as a single-scan trace. A compact one-dimensional residual U-Net is trained using two complementary strategies: a reference-supervised baseline that maps individual noisy traces to long-average reference waveforms, and a Noise2Noise approach that learns from pairs of independently acquired noisy traces without requiring a clean training target. Averaging the predictions of both models reduces systematic bias and yields a trace-reduction factor of approximately 5.4× at K=1, meaning that one denoised trace achieves the reconstruction accuracy of averaging approximately five raw traces. The Noise2Noise model alone achieves 4.9×, outperforming both the reference-supervised baseline (4.6×) and classical Wiener filtering (3.2×). These results show that self-supervised learning from repeated noisy measurements can support faster continuous-scan THz-TDS without hardware modification.
Adam Umra, Oways Alsoloh, Oliver Nagy +2
Institute of Digital Communication Systems, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany · Photonics and Ultrafast Laser Science, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Plasma diagnostic models for tokamak fusion devices are almost universally evaluated on clean, complete sensor data. In practice, fusion diagnostics fail regularly: acquisition systems start late, individual sensors die, and signal dropouts cluster precisely when a plasma disruption is approaching. We present the first systematic robustness benchmark for plasma diagnostic ML using the TokaMark dataset of 11,573 MAST shots, evaluating XGBoost, LSTM, Transformer, and the TokaMark CNN baseline across six physically-grounded failure scenarios and three imputation strategies. We introduce the Robustness Score (RS) for standardized cross-architecture comparison. Our central finding is that disruption-proximate sensor failure (corruption injected in the final window timesteps) collapses sequence model performance (LSTM +212% NRMSE) while a statistical feature model remains comparatively stable (XGBoost +37%). Forward-fill imputation eliminates nearly all degradation from random dropout for sequence models (LSTM +57% to ~0%), but offers little help when the end of the window is corrupted. Shot-level alarm evaluation using ground-truth disruption timestamps reveals that LSTM alarm detection collapses to TPR=0.00 under proximate sensor failure, while mean-fill imputation recovers it to TPR=1.00, a reversal of the pattern observed in NRMSE. Plasma current emerges as the single most critical diagnostic across all architectures (+73% to +140% upon removal). Code, data, and trained checkpoints are available at https://github.com/Neerav-Gupta/tokamark-robustness.