Smart manufacturing under limited and heterogeneous data: a sim-to-real transfer learning with convolutional variational autoencoder in thermoforming
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Data in advanced manufacturing are often sparse and collected from various sensory devices in a heterogeneous and multi-modal fashion. Thus, for such intricate input spaces, learning robust and reliable predictive models for product quality assessments entails implementing complex nonlinear models such as deep learning. However, these ‘data-greedy’ models require massive datasets for training, and they tend to exhibit poor generalization performance otherwise. To address the data paucity and the data heterogeneity in smart manufacturing applications, this paper introduces a sim-to-real transfer-learning framework. Specifically, using a unified wide-and-deep learning approach, the model pre-processes structured sensory data (wide) as well as high-dimensional thermal images (deep) separately, and then passes the respective concatenated features to a regressor for predicting product quality metrics. Convolutional variational autoencoder (ConvVAE) is utilized to learn concise representations of thermal images in an unsupervised fashion. ConvVAE is trained via a sim-to-real transfer learning approach, backed by theory-based heat transfer simulations. The proposed metamodeling framework was evaluated in an industrial thermoforming process case study. The results suggested that ConvVAE outperforms conventional dimensionality reduction methods despite limited data. A model explainability analysis was conducted and the resulting SHAP values demonstrated the agreement between the model’s predictions, theoretical expectations, and data correlation statistics.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it