arXiv subjects

Andrew Oakleigh Nelson

Publications and source records attributed to Andrew Oakleigh Nelson.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

EurekaBench: Measuring Agentic Ability to Discover New Scientific Insights

When Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravitation, he did so through an iterative process of analyzing observed data such as planetary patterns, finding the underlying mechanisms by describing patterns in mathematical equations, and refining his theory against the Moon's orbit, revealing the startling insight that the same force governs both falling apples and orbiting planets. Would it be possible for AI agents to make similar discoveries? To measure this ability, we introduce EurekaBench, a cross-domain benchmark that tests AI agents' ability to conduct long-horizon experiments and discover mechanisms that explain observations. We evaluate these mechanisms by the scientific insights that can be derived from them. EurekaBench contains an expert-verified set of 26 long-horizon tasks across neuroscience, computer science, chemistry, astrophysics, geophysics, and plasma physics, with a total of 306 scientific insights that the discovered mechanisms are expected to support. Our evaluation framework tests three axes of scientific discovery: agents' ability to follow known scientific constraints, the predictive accuracy of the discovered mechanisms, and whether these mechanisms yield scientific insights or inform future research. Our results show that current AI agents often overly fixate on predictive accuracy optimization, surpassing human scientists, while falling substantially short in deriving scientific insights.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Quantifying Resolution Limits in Pedestal Profile Measurements with Gaussian Process Regression

Edge transport barriers (ETBs) in magnetically confined fusion plasmas, commonly known as pedestals, play a crucial role in achieving high confinement plasmas. However, their defining characteristic, a steep rise in plasma pressure over short length scales, makes them challenging to diagnose experimentally. In this work, we use Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) to develop first-principles metrics for quantifying the spatiotemporal resolution limits of inferring differentiable profiles of temperature, pressure, or other quantities from experimental measurements. Although we focus on pedestals, the methods are fully general and can be applied to any setting involving the inference of profiles from discrete measurements. First, we establish a correspondence between GPR and low-pass filtering, giving an explicit expression for the effective `cutoff frequency' associated with smoothing incurred by GPR. Second, we introduce a novel information-theoretic metric, \(N_{eff}\), which measures the effective number of data points contributing to the inferred value of a profile or its derivative. These metrics enable a quantitative assessment of the trade-off between `over-fitting' and `over-regularization', providing both practitioners and consumers of GPR with a systematic way to evaluate the credibility of inferred profiles. We apply these tools to develop practical advice for using GPR in both time-independent and time-dependent settings, and demonstrate their usage on inferring pedestal profiles using measurements from the DIII-D tokamak.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2025

Technical Aspects of Plasma Operational Simulation (POPSIM): A Framework for Data-Driven Simulation and Control

This paper reports on technical aspects of Plasma Operational Simulation (POPSIM), a research framework for data-driven simulation and control built in the machine learning framework JAX. The objective of the project is to address the extremely challenging simulation and modeling requirements of tokamak operations and control by combining simple principles-based models with data-driven models, spanning everything from power laws to new neural network architectures. This paper reports on key software and operations problems that the framework addresses, with examples from ongoing modeling activities for illustration.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2024

Multimodal Super-Resolution: Discovering hidden physics and its application to fusion plasmas

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.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2024

Highest Fusion Performance without Harmful Edge Energy Bursts in Tokamak

The path of tokamak fusion and ITER is maintaining high-performance plasma to produce sufficient fusion power. This effort is hindered by the transient energy burst arising from the instabilities at the boundary of high-confinement plasmas. The application of 3D magnetic perturbations is the method in ITER and possibly in future fusion power plants to suppress this instability and avoid energy busts damaging the device. Unfortunately, the conventional use of the 3D field in tokamaks typically leads to degraded fusion performance and an increased risk of other plasma instabilities, two severe issues for reactor implementation. In this work, we present an innovative 3D field optimization, exploiting machine learning, real-time adaptability, and multi-device capabilities to overcome these limitations. This integrated scheme is successfully deployed on DIII-D and KSTAR tokamaks, consistently achieving reactor-relevant core confinement and the highest fusion performance without triggering damaging instabilities or bursts while demonstrating ITER-relevant automated 3D optimization for the first time. This is enabled both by advances in the physics understanding of self-organized transport in the plasma edge and by advances in machine-learning technology, which is used to optimize the 3D field spectrum for automated management of a volatile and complex system. These findings establish real-time adaptive 3D field optimization as a crucial tool for ITER and future reactors to maximize fusion performance while simultaneously minimizing damage to machine components.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2021

Neural Dynamical Systems: Balancing Structure and Flexibility in Physical Prediction

We introduce Neural Dynamical Systems (NDS), a method of learning dynamical models in various gray-box settings which incorporates prior knowledge in the form of systems of ordinary differential equations. NDS uses neural networks to estimate free parameters of the system, predicts residual terms, and numerically integrates over time to predict future states. A key insight is that many real dynamical systems of interest are hard to model because the dynamics may vary across rollouts. We mitigate this problem by taking a trajectory of prior states as the input to NDS and train it to dynamically estimate system parameters using the preceding trajectory. We find that NDS learns dynamics with higher accuracy and fewer samples than a variety of deep learning methods that do not incorporate the prior knowledge and methods from the system identification literature which do. We demonstrate these advantages first on synthetic dynamical systems and then on real data captured from deuterium shots from a nuclear fusion reactor. Finally, we demonstrate that these benefits can be utilized for control in small-scale experiments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Offline Contextual Bayesian Optimization for Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear fusion is regarded as the energy of the future since it presents the possibility of unlimited clean energy. One obstacle in utilizing fusion as a feasible energy source is the stability of the reaction. Ideally, one would have a controller for the reactor that makes actions in response to the current state of the plasma in order to prolong the reaction as long as possible. In this work, we make preliminary steps to learning such a controller. Since learning on a real world reactor is infeasible, we tackle this problem by attempting to learn optimal controls offline via a simulator, where the state of the plasma can be explicitly set. In particular, we introduce a theoretically grounded Bayesian optimization algorithm that recommends a state and action pair to evaluate at every iteration and show that this results in more efficient use of the simulator.

cs.LG↗