Classification of the L-, H-mode, and plasma-free state: Convolutional neural networks and variational autoencoders on the edge reflectometer for KSTAR

Classifying and monitoring the L-, H-mode, and plasma-free state are essential for the stable operational control of tokamaks. Edge reflectometry measures plasma density profiles, but the large volume of data and complexity in reconstruction pose significant challenges. There is a need for efficient methods to analyze complex reflectometer data in real-time, which can be addressed using advanced computational techniques. Here, we show that machine learning (ML) techniques can classify discharge states using raw signal data from an edge reflectometer installed on the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research. The deep convolutional neural network models achieved classification accuracy of up to 99% when using 2D spectrogram inputs, demonstrating a significant improvement over 1D raw signal inputs. Additionally, the variational autoencoder model effectively clustered the discharge states in the latent space without any label information, further validating the model's capability to classify discharge states. These results suggest that the ML model can effectively handle the complexity of reflectometer data and accurately classify plasma discharge states. This approach not only facilitates real-time diagnosis but also reduces the need for manual data processing.