Baran Özden, Prometheus: Towards Industrial Foundation Models for Continuous Production Environments
Continuous production environments (refineries, power grids) generate vast multivariate sensor data, yet remain stuck in fragmented “Narrow AI” while foundation models transformed language and vision. This thesis introduces Prometheus, a compact 1.6M-parameter bidirectional Transformer encoder that reads a plant’s sensors as a language and learns its coupled physics through self-supervised “Four-Teacher” geometric masking. On a crude distillation unit, Prometheus wins all 38 channels on every metric, surpasses zero-shot Time-Series Foundation Models up to ~300× larger, reconstructs entirely missing sensors, and beats a deployed industrial soft sensor, evidence that domain specialization, not generalized scale, is the path toward Industrial Foundation Models.
Date: 25.06.2026 / 14:30 Place: A-212









