March 2026

Conference Paper

Counter Data Paucity through Adversarial Invariance Encoding: A Case Study on Modeling Battery Thermal Runaway

By:
Tabassum, Anika ; Allu, Srikanth ; Kannan, Ramakrishnan ; Muralidhar, Nikhil
Page Number:
2224-2233
Book Title:
2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)
Publication Date:
March 2026
Publisher Location:
IEEE, New Jersey, United States of America
Conference Name:
IEEE BigData 2024: IEEE International Conference on Big Data
Conference Location:
Washington DC, District of Columbia, United States of America
Conference Sponsor:
IEEE
View DOI Listing:
https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData62323.2024.10825483

Abstract

Lithium-ion batteries, widely used for their durability and high energy storage, face the risk of internal short circuits leading to catastrophic thermal runaway events. These events, triggered by external stimuli like mechanical loads, pose safety concerns in applications such as electric vehicles. Detecting and understanding thermal runaway events is crucial, but physics-driven models struggle to explain the non-linear evolution of battery temperature during these events, considering factors like material composition and state-of-charge. Due to the rarity of these events and the cost of data collection, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to predict battery temperature responses during thermal runaway. The challenge lies in the scarcity of data, making traditional DL models prone to overfitting and learning low-quality representations of the complex process.Our approach introduces a novel few-shot architecture that incorporates an adversarially governed invariant encoding process. This architecture aims to distill "invariant" relationships by addressing distributional shifts in data across various battery properties, facilitating the detection of thermal runaway events. Specifically, our results demonstrate that deep learning models conditioned on these "invariant" representations outperform state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a remarkable 96.8% performance improvement in terms of the popular metric MAPE. This framework presents a promising direction for enhancing battery safety modeling, particularly in the context of rare and complex events like thermal runaway. Our code and code and dataset used for the paper are public1.