Diffusion Partition Consensus: Diffusion-Aided Time-of-Flight Estimates, Anomaly Detection, and Localization for Ultrasonic Nondestructive Evaluation Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Diffusion partition consensus is a novel generative AI-based technique for time-series anomaly detection and data imputation in the presence of outliers. To illustrate the method, an implementation with design choices tailored for well-structured time series typical of single probe ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation (NDE) datasets is proposed. The technique relies on cross-talk between a conditional score-based diffusion model, and two well-chosen Savitzky-Golay filters. Testing and evaluation are performed on a series of progressively information rich synthetic datasets, and on real-world ultrasonic NDE datasets taken from a Canada Deuterium Uranium nuclear reactor pressure tube and calibration fixture. The iterative technique is a blend of stochastic and deterministic methods that uses confidence and consensus of target parameter estimates to update several data classifying partitions over the dataset, which in turn allows a new set of estimates and confidence measures to be established. Data classification induces a progressive bias in the training datasets allowing a diffusion model to identify the prevalent distribution. Methods for fault diagnosis support the efficacious inclusion of a human in the loop making the technique suitable for use in safety-critical applications. The main advantages of the technique are that it is unsupervised—in that it does not require labeled datasets or significant data preprocessing, does not rely on out-of-distribution generalization, provides means for fault diagnosis without recourse to ground truth, converges with stability, and naturally includes a human in the loop. The quality of results, the checks and balances provided by the fault diagnosis mechanism, and the opportunity to include a human in the loop, support the case for usage in safety-critical contexts such as NDE at a nuclear power facility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".