arXiv Computer Vision

ARENA: Active Region attENtion Aggregation for interpretable solar flare prediction

The paper introduces ARENA, a neural network that predicts solar flares by aggregating information from multiple active‑region cutouts and learning to focus on the most relevant region. It uses weakly supervised multiple‑instance learning, requiring only a flare/no‑flare label, and its attention mechanism localizes the driving active region without explicit annotations. ARENA attains a Heidke skill score of 0.45, comparable to existing methods, showing that active‑region aggregation can yield efficient and interpretable flare predictions.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Semi-LAR: Semi-supervised Contrastive Learning with Linear Attention for Removal of Nighttime Flares

The paper introduces Semi-LAR, a semi‑supervised framework for removing nighttime lens flares. It uses an adaptive pseudo‑label repository that refines supervision through quality assessment, momentum updates, and invalid label filtering. A flare‑aware contrastive loss treats flare‑contaminated inputs as negatives, encouraging representations that distinguish flare patterns while aligning with reliable pseudo targets.

By Xiyu Zhu, Wei Wang, Kui Jiang, Zhengguo Li
arXiv AI
Sep 24

PISCES: Physics-Informed Solar-wind Convolutional autoEncoder for Space-weather Anomaly Detection and Early Warning

PISCES is a physics‑informed convolutional autoencoder designed to detect solar‑wind transients for space‑weather early warning. Trained on OMNI solar‑wind data without catalog labels, its loss incorporates magnetic field consistency, temperature‑velocity relations, the Parker spiral angle, and temporal smoothness penalties. During inference, PISCES decomposes the anomaly score into magnetic, plasma, physics‑relation, and residual components, enabling alarms that can precede observed sudden commencements and positive sudden impulses.

By Kevin Lee, Alison J. March
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Horizon-specific Expert Fusion for Photovoltaic Power Forecasting

The paper presents a hierarchical ensemble for short‑term photovoltaic power forecasting that fuses temporal neural models, historical analogs, state climatology, and gradient‑boosted trees with horizon‑specific convex weights. Solar geometry and numerical weather forecasts provide expected generation conditions, while a calibration step corrects recent bias using historical forecast errors. Evaluated on PVDAQ and GEFCom2014 data, the ensemble reduces mean absolute error by up to 6% compared to strong individual models, though its advantage varies with dataset and horizon.

By Xu Yuqing, Zhou Liguo, Sun Ze, Yu Lei, Jiang Mingming
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

SolarBench: A global solar energy nowcasting benchmark

SolarBench is an open global benchmark for image-based solar nowcasting that consolidates over six million sky and satellite images from 11 sites across a decade, paired with irradiance, PV output, and atmospheric data. The benchmark includes a toolbox for reproducible data access, processing, model development, and evaluation. Using SolarBench, the authors benchmark representative models, uncover a gap between average forecasting accuracy and the capture of rapid solar fluctuations, quantify predictability across cloud regimes, and demonstrate data‑efficient adaptation to new PV systems.

By Yuhao Nie, Stephen Campbell, Quentin Paletta, Liwenbo Zhang, Tao Jing, Samer Chaaraoui, Jonathan Giezendanner, Andea Scott, Tao Sun, Cong Feng, Max Aragon, Jacques Camier, Adam Jensen, Florian Kotthoff, Yuexing Yang, Yang Ming, Mengying Li, Stefanie Meilinger, Yupeng Wu, Adam Brandt, Sherrie Wang
arXiv AI
6d ago

IMPACT: Inverter-Informed Multimodal Learning for Photovoltaic Generation Forecasting

The paper introduces IMPACT, a physics‑informed multimodal deep‑learning framework that forecasts photovoltaic power 10–110 minutes ahead with probabilistic outputs. It uses a four‑branch architecture to encode plant‑level temporal history, inverter‑level spatial cloud dynamics, known‑future solar geometry, and current meteorological data, fusing them via gated cross‑attention. The model outperforms 14 baselines, achieving a forecast skill score of 0.2950 and maintaining strong performance under overcast and variable sky conditions.

By Anushka Katiyar, Cong Feng, Jing Wang, Tristan Liu, Simon Julien, Zachary Jacobs