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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 145 records · Page 8

Charting the chemical space of Zintl phases with graph neural networks and bonding insights

A large number of Zintl phases have been discovered by solid-state chemists driven by empirical knowledge, chemical intuition and in some cases, through serendipitous accidents. These discoveries have only scratched the surface, given the vast compositional and structural diversity that Zintl phases can accommodate. The large chemical space of Zintl phases, as well as intermetallic compounds in general, remain under-explored. Here, we use graph neural networks and the upper bound energy minimization approach to efficiently scan a large chemical space of >90 000 hypothetical Zintl phases and accurately discover 1810 new thermodynamically stable phases with 90% precision, as validated with first-principles calculations. We show that our approach is more than 2× more accurate in predicting DFT stability than M3GNet (40% precision) on the same dataset. Using a random forest model and SHAP analysis, we demonstrate the critical role of ionic bonding in the thermodynamic stability of Zintl phases. Our results not only expand the known chemical landscape of Zintl phases but also highlight the efficacy of machine learning frameworks combined with domain knowledge in uncovering chemically meaningful insights across complex intermetallics.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Deep graph representations embed network information for robust disease marker identification

We report that the accurate disease diagnosis and prognosis based on omics data rely on the effective identification of robust prognostic and diagnostic markers that reflect the states of the biological processes underlying the disease pathogenesis and progression. In this article, we present GCNCC, a Graph Convolutional Network-based approach for Clustering and Classification, that can identify highly effective and robust network-based disease markers. Based on a geometric deep learning framework, GCNCC learns deep network representations by integrating gene expression data with protein interaction data to identify highly reproducible markers with consistently accurate prediction performance across independent datasets possibly from different platforms. GCNCC identifies these markers by clustering the nodes in the protein interaction network based on latent similarity measures learned by the deep architecture of a graph convolutional network, followed by a supervised feature selection procedure that extracts clusters that are highly predictive of the disease state. By benchmarking GCNCC based on independent datasets from different diseases (psychiatric disorder and cancer) and different platforms (microarray and RNA-seq), we show that GCNCC outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and reproducibility.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Topology-Dependent Performance of Free-Space Photonic Quantum Networks Under Noise

Photonic quantum communication enables secure and high-fidelity information transfer beyond classical limits, with direct relevance to emerging quantum networks operating in free-space environments. While physical-layer models of depolarizing noise, Gamma–Gamma turbulence statistics, entanglement swapping, and decoy-state QKD security bounds are individually well established, prior work typically treats these components in isolation or under fixed network assumptions. In this work, we develop a unified topology-aware analytical framework that simultaneously integrates free-space optical link budgets, turbulence-induced visibility degradation, depolarizing qubit noise, multi-hop entanglement cascade dynamics, teleportation fidelity thresholds, CHSH nonlocality certification, and asymptotic decoy-state secret key rate bounds across star, mesh, and ring graph structures. Rather than introducing new physical channel models, we demonstrate that identical physical links exhibit fundamentally different end-to-end performance once embedded within different network topologies. Mesh architectures minimize visibility cascade through hop-count reduction but incur quadratic hardware scaling. Star topologies minimize link count but concentrate noise and synchronization overhead at the hub. Ring configurations offer linear hardware scaling with multiplicative fidelity degradation. The results establish topology as a first-order design parameter in near-term free-space quantum networks operating without full quantum repeater infrastructures. While motivated by distributed multi-agent architectures, the framework applies broadly to terrestrial, airborne, and satellite-assisted photonic quantum communication systems.

QKD↗

Cyber Security Analysis for Nuclear Reactor Control Systems (Final Technical Report)

This project investigated the cyber-security impacts of moving from an all analog, point-to-point, instrumentation and control (I&C) system to a digital I&C system based on Modbus and a shared communication medium. A formalism called a hybrid attack graph was expanded to support the nuclear research reactor system. The hybrid attack graph allows one to check a system for vulnerabilities, in this case cyber-security vulnerabilities, and to document the attack vectors (scenarios) causing those vulnerabilities. In parallel, a simulation of the system was developed to model both the physical reactor parameters and operations, as well as the network interconnects and communications. This simulation platform was modeled on the nuclear research reactor located at Washington State University. The simulation platform provided a sandbox to evaluate and quantify the impact of identified and proposed vulnerabilities in the system and to determine the effectiveness of countermeasures at stopping these attacks. The simulation and hybrid attack graph tools were integrated to provide a streamlined process of generating attack scenarios, playing those scenarios out in the simulation, and then analyzing the results to correlate system state to states in the hybrid attack graph. This process was used to (1) quantify the impact of attack scenarios and (2) to determine if the system moved through the hybrid attack graph as anticipated. The hybrid attack graph tool was extended and customized to produce a tool to automatically identify critical assets (CAs) and critical digital assets (CDAs) as defined by NRC Regulatory Guide 5.71. This tool was verified using the nuclear research reactor at Washington State University. Finally, a series of educational modules covering the findings of the different aspects of this research have been created.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Enabling Real-Time Communication in Multi-Agent Systems: A Graph Neural Network Based Approach

Global connectivity enables effective coordination in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Solving these connection problems under hardware constraints is an NP-hard non-Euclidean Degree Constrained Minimum Spanning Tree (DCMST) problem. Prior MAS controllers coordinate team movement for task completion and collision avoidance; some considering Line-of-Sight (LOS) maintenance but prioritizing flexibility over guarantees. Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) have been shown to find good solutions for DCMST, but their performance degrades with larger populations required to support a large MAS. We present a method based on edge graph attention networks, trained offline to reduce online computation times. Empirical comparisons with greedy polynomial-time solvers and EA show that our method leverages latent graph information to consistently find constraint-satisfying solutions in less time.

connectivity maintenance↗

Extracting Einstein from the loop-level double-copy

The naive double-copy of (multi) loop amplitudes involving massive matter coupled to gauge theories will generically produce amplitudes in a gravitational theory that contains additional contributions from propagating antisymmetric tensor and dilaton states even at tree-level. We present a graph-based approach that combines the method of maximal cuts with double-copy construction to offer a systematic framework to isolate the pure Einstein-Hilbert gravitational contributions through loop level. Indeed this allows for a bootstrap of pure-gravitational results from the double-copy of massive scalar-QCD. We apply this to construct the novel result of the D-dimensional one-loop five-point QFT integrand relevant in the classical limit to generating observables associated with the radiative effects of massive black-hole scattering via pure Einstein-Hilbert gravity.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Language models for materials discovery and sustainability: Progress, challenges, and opportunities

Significant advancements have been made in one of the most critical branches of artificial intelligence: natural language processing (NLP). These advancements are exemplified by the remarkable success of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5/4 and the recent release of GPT-4.5, which have sparked a global surge of interest akin to an NLP gold rush. Here, in this article, we offer our perspective on the development and application of NLP and large language models (LLMs) in materials science. We begin by presenting an overview of recent advancements in NLP within the broader scientific landscape, with a particular focus on their relevance to materials science. Next, we examine how NLP can facilitate the understanding and design of novel materials and its potential integration with other methodologies. To highlight key challenges and opportunities, we delve into three specific topics: (i) the limitations of LLMs and their implications for materials science applications, (ii) the creation of a fully automated materials discovery pipeline, and (iii) the potential of GPT-like tools to synthesize existing knowledge and aid in the design of sustainable materials.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

A Novel Framework to Quantify Power Grid Resilience

The quantification of an operating power grid’s resilience is highly significant today, given its criticality as an enabler of other infrastructures, complexity, and the threat it faces due to a wide range of detrimental events, from extreme climate to cyber attacks. Currently, there exist no standardized definitions and metrics for measuring the resilience of an operating grid. In this paper, we introduce a novel resilience quantification framework and demonstrate a method to measure the flexibility towards topological/structural changes due to potential failures in the power grid to assess operational resilience. We start with the state estimation data from a large utility and use the graph analysis methods and power flow simulation tools to compute the identified resilience parameters.

Yoginath, Srikanth↗

ARCH: Large-scale knowledge graph via aggregated narrative codified health records analysis

Objective: Electronic health record (EHR) systems contain a wealth of clinical data stored as both codified data and free-text narrative notes (NLP). The complexity of EHR presents challenges in feature representation, information extraction, and uncertainty quantification. Here, to address these challenges, we proposed an efficient Aggregated naRrative Codified Health (ARCH) records analysis to generate a large-scale knowledge graph (KG) for a comprehensive set of EHR codified and narrative features. Methods: Using data from 12.5 million Veterans Affairs patients, ARCH first derives embedding vectors and generates similarities along with associated p-values to measure the strength of relatedness between clinical features with statistical certainty quantification. Next, ARCH performs a sparse embedding regression to remove indirect linkage between features to build a sparse KG. Finally, ARCH was validated on various clinical tasks, including detecting known relationships between entity pairs, predicting drug side effects, disease phenotyping, as well as sub-typing Alzheimer’s disease patients. Results: ARCH produces high-quality clinical embeddings and KG for over 60,000 codified and narrative EHR concepts. The KG and embeddings are visualized in the R-shiny powered web-API.3 ARCH achieved high accuracy in detecting EHR concept relationships, with AUCs of 0.926 (codified) and 0.861 (NLP) for similar EHR concepts, and 0.810 (codified) and 0.843 (NLP) for related pairs. It detected drug side effects with a 0.723 AUC, which improved to 0.826 after fine-tuning. Using both codified and NLP features, the detection power increased significantly. Compared to other methods, ARCH has superior accuracy and enhances weakly supervised phenotyping algorithms’ performance. Notably, it successfully categorized Alzheimer’s patients into two subgroups with varying mortality rates. Conclusion: The proposed ARCH algorithm generates large-scale high-quality semantic representations and knowledge graph for both codified and NLP EHR features, useful for a wide range of predictive modeling tasks.

Electronic health records↗

Track Seeding and Labelling with Embedded-space Graph Neural Networks

To address the unprecedented scale of HL-LHC data, the Exa.TrkX project is investigating a variety of machine learning approaches to particle track reconstruction. The most promising of these solutions, graph neural networks (GNN), process the event as a graph that connects track measurements (detector hits corresponding to nodes) with candidate line segments between the hits (corresponding to edges). Detector information can be associated with nodes and edges, enabling a GNN to propagate the embedded parameters around the graph and predict node-, edge- and graph-level observables. Previously, message-passing GNNs have shown success in predicting doublet likelihood, and we here report updates on the state-of-the-art architectures for this task. In addition, the Exa.TrkX project has investigated innovations in both graph construction, and embedded representations, in an effort to achieve fully learned end-to-end track finding. Hence, we present a suite of extensions to the original model, with encouraging results for hitgraph classification. In addition, we explore increased performance by constructing graphs from learned representations which contain non-linear metric structure, allowing for efficient clustering and neighborhood queries of data points. We demonstrate how this framework fits in with both traditional clustering pipelines, and GNN approaches. The embedded graphs feed into high-accuracy doublet and triplet classifiers, or can be used as an end-to-end track classifier by clustering in an embedded space. A set of post-processing methods improve performance with knowledge of the detector physics. Finally, we present numerical results on the TrackML particle tracking challenge dataset, where our framework shows favorable results in both seeding and track finding.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

What Is the Agent Doing? Visualizing Agentic AI Querying Workflows

We explore how visualizations can help users understand what an AI agent is doing as it builds and runs queries over data. As part of the LinkQ system, a natural language interface for querying knowledge graphs with a large language model (LLM), we designed two complementary views: A State Diagram that shows where the agent is within a larger workflow, and a Live Action Display that gives real-time updates about the agent's current task. In a study with 14 practitioners, we found that these visuals helped participants build stronger mental models of the agent's behavior while also increasing their confidence in the system. However, we also observed that users sometimes trusted incorrect outputs simply because the agent appeared to be doing the "right" thing. Our findings point to both the value and risk of visualizing agent behavior in interactive AI systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Solving MaxCut with quantum imaginary time evolution

We introduce a method to solve the MaxCut problem efficiently based on quantum imaginary time evolution (QITE). We employ a linear Ansatz for unitary updates and an initial state involving no entanglement, as well as an imaginary-time-dependent Hamiltonian interpolating between a given graph and a subgraph with two edges excised. We apply the method to thousands of randomly selected graphs with up to fifty vertices. We show that our algorithm exhibits a 93% and above performance converging to the maximum solution of the MaxCut problem for all considered graphs. Our results compare favorably with the performance of classical algorithms, such as the greedy and Goemans–Williamson algorithms. We also discuss the overlap of the final state of the QITE algorithm with the ground state as a performance metric, which is a quantum feature not shared by other classical algorithms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Graph-Based Prediction of Spatio-Temporal Vaccine Hesitancy From Insurance Claims Data

Growing vaccine hesitancy is contributing to the decline in immunization rates for highly contagious, vaccine-preventable childhood diseases. Therefore, there has been a significant interest in understanding how hesitancy is spreading at higher spatio-temporal resolutions, enabling more targeted interventions. Motivated by this, we study the problem of prediction of vaccine hesitancy at the ZIP Code level, referred to as the VaxHesitancy problem. A significant challenge for this problem is the lack of high-resolution data that indicates hesitancy. Here, we develop a hybrid VaxHesSTL framework that combines a Graph Neural Network (GNN) and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to address the VaxHesitancy problem. The GNN uses a ZIP Code-level network to capture spatial signals from neighboring areas, while the RNN models the temporal dynamics present in the data. We train and evaluate VaxHesSTL using a large dataset, namely the All-Payer Claims Databases (APCD), for Virginia, consisting of insurance claims from over five million individuals for six years. We find that an aggregated contact network or graph, developed from a detailed activity-based population network, plays an important role in the performance of VaxHesSTL, compared to graph models based solely on spatial proximity. Experiments demonstrate that VaxHesSTL outperforms a range of state-of-the-art baselines, which rely solely on historical time series data without accounting for spatial relationships. Since hesitancy data at higher spatial resolution is often unavailable or hard to get, we incorporate an active learning approach with our VaxHesSTL framework to optimize the training set without compromising the prediction performance. We find that hesitancy data for only 18% of ZIP Codes selected by active learning allows us to forecast hesitancy for all the ZIP Codes in the Virginia.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

SPARTA: High-Level Synthesis of Parallel Multi-Threaded Accelerators

This article presents a methodology for the Synthesis of PARallel multi-Threaded Accelerators (SPARTA) from OpenMP annotated C/C++ specifications. SPARTA extends an open-source HLS tool, enabling the generation of accelerators that provide latency tolerance for irregular memory accesses through multithreading, support fine-grained memory-level parallelism through a hot-potato deflection-based network-on-chip (NoC), support synchronization constructs, and can instantiate memory-side caches. Our approach is based on a custom runtime OpenMP library, providing flexibility and extensibility. Experimental results show high scalability when synthesizing irregular graph kernels. The accelerators generated with our approach are, on average, 2.29x faster than state-of-the-art HLS methodologies.

Design automation↗

Deep learning for characterizing the self-assembly of three-dimensional colloidal systems

Creating a systematic framework to characterize the structural states of colloidal self-assembly systems is crucial for unraveling the fundamental understanding of these systems’ stochastic and non-linear behavior. The most accurate characterization methods create high-dimensional neighborhood graphs that may not provide useful information about structures unless these are well-defined reference crystalline structures. Dimensionality reduction methods are thus required to translate the neighborhood graphs into a low-dimensional space that can be easily interpreted and used to characterize non-reference structures. We investigate a framework for colloidal system state characterization that employs deep learning methods to reduce the dimensionality of neighborhood graphs. The framework next uses agglomerative hierarchical clustering techniques to partition the low-dimensional space and assign physically meaningful classifications to the resulting partitions. In this work, we first demonstrate the proposed colloidal self-assembly state characterization framework on a three-dimensional in silico system of 500 multi-flavored colloids that self-assemble under isothermal conditions. We next investigate the generalizability of the characterization framework by applying the framework to several independent self-assembly trajectories, including a three-dimensional in silico system of 2052 colloidal particles that undergo evaporation-induced self-assembly.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Large-scale experimental validation of thermochemical water-splitting oxides discovered by defect graph neural networks

Thermochemical water-splitting (TCH) based on 2-step thermal redox cycles in metal oxides is a promising approach to generating H 2 , but state-of-the-art (SOTA) CeO 2 has several practical limitations, which has motivated continued materials discovery efforts in this field. Here, in this study, we improve upon a SOTA defect graph neural network (dGNN) surrogate model's oxygen vacancy predictions and combine them with materials project phase diagrams to down-select and discover structurally diverse, experimentally known metal oxides whose TCH performance was previously unknown. Amongst twelve candidates selected based on our high-throughput screening and down-selection criteria, we achieved ∼80% accuracy in identifying materials with stable redox cycling and hydrogen production in stagnation flow reactor water-splitting experiments. Closer to 100% accuracy can be achieved if higher-accuracy, hybrid DFT-predicted vacancy formation energies were computed and used in lieu of the most uncertain dGNN-based screening predictions, as they correct false positives to true negatives. Notably, two discovered candidates, Sr 3 PrMn 2 O 8 and Ba 2 Fe 2 O 5 , display hydrogen yields greater than CeO 2 under specific redox conditions. In conclusion, these results demonstrate our ability to computationally predict and experimentally validate promising candidate TCH materials that have the potential to compete with CeO 2 .

08 HYDROGEN↗

Multitask graph neural networks for elastoplastic response prediction in dual-phase polycrystals

Microstructure-sensitive prediction of elastoplastic response remains a recurring bottleneck in multiscale damage and fatigue modeling, where large ensembles of statistically distinct polycrystals are required to quantify variability and extreme-value behavior. In this work, we develop a multitask graph neural network (GNN) surrogate that maps dual-phase ferrite–martensite polycrystal microstructures to Statistical Volume Element (SVE)-level elastoplastic Quantities of Interest (QoIs). Each SVE is represented as a grain-adjacency graph, with node features encoding phase, geometry, and crystallographic orientation, and edge features encoding relative misorientation. A message-passing graph convolution generates node embeddings, which are pooled into a graph representation and passed to a multitask regression head that jointly predicts 10 scalar QoIs and vector-valued stress–strain responses in orthogonal loading directions across multiple martensite volume fractions and SVE sizes. Results show high accuracy for scalar QoIs and strong agreement for full stress–strain trajectories, with population envelopes reproducing both median behavior and finite-SVE variability across compositions and partition scales. A unified model trained on pooled volume-fraction data preserves most within-regime accuracy relative to regime-specific models while also capturing the broader cross-regime variation reflected in the pooled test set. Distributional comparisons further demonstrate that the surrogate preserves heterogeneity under SVE partitioning, enabling statistically consistent block-wise random-field construction for mesoscale analyses. Overall, the proposed grain-graph surrogate provides a practical pathway to accelerate ensemble-based studies of SVE-level constitutive variability in dual-phase polycrystals.

Crystal plasticity↗