industrial process engineers

Abstract: Multi-target regression requires a model to simultaneously predict several related outputs. Conformal prediction provides distribution-free, finite-sample marginal coverage guarantees, but extending these to joint multi-dimensional regions in a model-agnostic, sample-efficient manner remains challenging: max-aggregation ignores scale differences, copula-based methods are only asymptotically valid, rectangular methods typically split the calibration set, and quantile or density-based methods require training a specialised model beyond a plain point predictor. We propose the scaling-score conformal method, which is model-agnostic (requires only component-wise absolute residuals), uses a single calibration set, and yields four nested output types: an outer rectangle (SCO) with valid joint coverage, the exact set R $α$ , a staircase (SC 2 ) over approximation of R $α$ , and an inner rectangle (SCI). A single hyperparameter $γ$ $\in$ (0, 1) controls the base-rectangle quantile level independently of $α$. We prove downward-closedness and a rectangular sandwich bound and derive a closed-form outer rectangle. Experiments on 29 realworld datasets confirm valid joint coverage; SC 2 with $γ$ = 1-$α$ consistently achieves competitive volume relative to baselines, with the advantage growing with output dimension d.

Abstract: Manufacturing consumes one third of global energy and still has significant room for improvement in terms of energy efficiency. Optimal process control is essential for this purpose. However, synthesizing mathematical optimization models from messy, real-world industrial specifications requires bridging unstructured natural language and spatial diagrams with rigorous mathematical syntax. This poses a profound challenge for general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), which may introduce invalid constraints when tasked with modeling continuous multi-physics dynamics. To address this, we introduce little m, an AI agent designed to assist the formulation of industrial process control models. Combining a domain-specific knowledge repository with LLM-driven interaction, the proposed framework formulates real-world optimization problems as mathematical models. For systematic evaluation, we introduce the Industrial Process Control Benchmark (IPC-Bench), a novel multimodal dataset of 50 canonical scenarios requiring joint reasoning over text and process diagrams. Through comprehensive automated structural assessments and double-blind human evaluation, little m substantially outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs, generating semantically correct models. These evaluations assess formulation quality rather than solver feasibility, formal physical validity, or closed-loop industrial performance. The implementation of little m and the IPC-Bench dataset are available at https://github.com/yeyongchao/process-modeling-benchmark.

Abstract: Void fraction, which quantifies the proportion of the fluid flow volume occupied by the gas phase, is a key parameter in the characterization of gas-liquid two-phase flow. Existing estimation methods either rely on flow assumptions that do not generalize across different fluids or on intrusive sensing that disturbs the flow behavior. We propose VFNet, a dual-branch spatio-temporal neural network for void-fraction prediction from synchronized multi-view videos of two-phase flow. A local branch extracts features from confined spatial regions and fuses the synchronized dual views, while a spatio-temporal branch captures the global evolution of the flow across space and time to refine a coarse geometric estimate. Trained on simulated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data with known ground-truth void fractions and evaluated against both learning-based and traditional baselines, VFNet achieves the best performance across a broad range of metrics and also improves downstream flow-pattern classification on real two-phase flow data.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a class-wise dimension (channel) selection framework for Multivariate Time Series Classification (MTSC). Rather than applying a single global dimension selection process, the proposed approach independently identifies informative dimensions for each class. A dedicated learning process is subsequently performed for each class, followed by a fusion stage for final prediction. The objective is to improve the generation of discriminative feature representations while reducing the influence of noisy or non-informative dimensions. The proposed framework is evaluated using MiniRocket, a random kernel-based baseline method. Experimental results indicate that class-wise dimension selection improves the quality of extracted representations and can enhance classification performance, particularly in high-dimensional settings. These findings suggest that incorporating class-specific information into the training process represents a promising direction for MTSC, improving robustness through consistent gains across heterogeneous datasets, and interpretability through the explicit identification of class-relevant dimensions.