IPM-FM: A Foundation Model with Consensus Feature Selection for Industrial Process Monitoring
Liang Cao, Weide Liu, Yan Qin, Jun Cheng, Weisi Lin, Bhushan Gopaluni
Abstract
Industrial process monitoring is fundamental to the safety and economic performance of modern process plants. Current practice remains a one-task-one-model paradigm that is label-inefficient and prone to degradation under operating drift. Foundation models have reshaped language, vision, and generic time-series forecasting, but it has not been adapted to industrial process monitoring. This setting poses domain-specific challenges, including safety-critical decisions and asymmetric sampling between process variables and laboratory measurements. We propose the industrial process monitoring foundation model (IPM-FM). It first learns general-purpose representations from unlabeled industrial process data through self-supervised pretraining, then adapts to specific monitoring tasks using a small amount of task-labeled data, and finally produces calibrated predictions through an uncertainty-aware prediction head. IPM-FM integrates a self-supervised Informer backbone with a multi-criteria consensus feature selector, a recursive lag-feature regression head, and a calibrated Monte Carlo dropout uncertainty module. On a seven-year hydrotreater dataset for diesel flash-point soft sensing, IPM-FM attains an RMSE of 2.99, $R^2$ of 0.50, and 97\% coverage of its 95\% predictive interval, outperforming the strongest classical and from-scratch sequence baselines by 8.3\% and 14.6\% in RMSE respectively, supporting the viability of a unified pretraining--adaptation framework for industrial process monitoring.