Tokamak-SI: Interpreting Tokamak Discharges with Labeled Catalogs

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.

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.

Disruption predictors must warn the plasma control system early enough for the intended response, and the required warning time differs between mitigation and avoidance. We view a warning system as a predictor that outputs a disruption risk and an alarm policy that acts on it, and ask which risk the predictor should learn. Binary classifiers do not specify when a disruption occurs, and survival analysis models the full distribution of the time to disruption, whereas an alarm depends only on the risk within a finite horizon. We introduce two horizon-focused targets into tokamak disruption prediction: a horizon-truncated survival objective and fixed-horizon early event prediction (EEP) with temporal label smoothing (TLS). We compare them with binary classification and survival analysis on the DIII-D, Alcator C-Mod, and EAST databases of DisruptionBench, evaluating the risk by its threshold-free ranking at a 40 ms deadline and the alarm policy by thresholds calibrated on validation data. On every device, TLS outperforms the deep survival models in both ranking and alarm performance; TLS performs best on DIII-D and EAST, and a random forest trained on a hard horizon target performs best on C-Mod. TLS also improves the calibrated alarm performance over hard targets placed at either end of its smoothing range on all devices, isolating the benefit of label smoothing. Horizon truncation alone did not consistently improve survival analysis. Alarm performance remains limited on C-Mod and DIII-D and varies strongly across training seeds, and ablations show that the target should extend to the required warning time.