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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28022 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28022/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for fluid mechanics: A review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09506/) (2021)
- [LSTM-based Encoder-Decoder for Multi-sensor Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00148/) (2016)
- [Current Time Series Anomaly Detection Benchmarks are Flawed and are Creating the Illusion of Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13807/) (2020)
- [Towards a Rigorous Evaluation of Time-series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05257/) (2021)
- [Precision and Recall for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03639/) (2018)
- [Physics-Informed Convolutional Autoencoder for Cyber Anomaly Detection in Power Distribution Grids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04758/) (2023)
- [Automatic Detection of Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections in Solar Wind In Situ Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03578/) (2022)
- [ARCANE -- Early Detection of Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09365/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Space weather early warning depends on detecting solar wind transients in in-situ measurements at the first Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L1), before they reach Earth. Fixed thresholds can miss combined magnetic and plasma structure, and many learning methods provide a single anomaly score. We present the Physics-Informed Solar-wind Convolutional autoEncoder for Space-weather (PISCES), a convolutional autoencoder trained without catalog labels on OMNI solar wind measurements under physics constraints. Its loss includes magnetic field consistency, an empirical relation between temperature and velocity, the Parker spiral angle, and penalties on changes between consecutive one-minute samples in derived quantities calculated from the reconstruction. At inference, PISCES separates the anomaly score into magnetic and plasma reconstruction errors, physics relations, and residual corrections, and reports the magnitude of each contribution. Attenuation of the skip connections, selected on validation data, improves average precision for the trained models, while the untrained scores remain nearly the same. The trained models also give a more consistent ordering of these physical contributions. After smoothing with a trailing median, the alarms can precede independently observed sudden commencements, including positive sudden impulses.