{
  "abstract": "Predicting solar flares is a challenging space-weather forecasting problem with potentially significant impacts on Earth's upper atmosphere, including disruptions to radio communications. We propose Active Region attENtion Aggregation (ARENA), a neural network architecture that predicts solar flares from a variable number of active-region cutouts while learning to identify the region most relevant to the prediction. ARENA is trained using multiple-instance learning under weak supervision, requiring only a flare/no-flare label for the observation and no labels specifying the flare origin. The learned attention mechanism therefore provides a means of localizing the active region driving the prediction without explicit origin annotations. ARENA achieves a heidke skill score of 0.45 which is comparable to other flare prediction approaches. These results demonstrate that active-region-based aggregation can provide an efficient and interpretable approach to solar flare prediction. The code is available at https://github.com/LuisBauer22/ARENA.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2610.32758",
  "author_total": 6,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Luis Bauer"
    },
    {
      "name": "Annalena Kofler"
    },
    {
      "name": "Andrés Asensio Ramos"
    },
    {
      "name": "Aparna Venkataramanasastry"
    },
    {
      "name": "Valentín Martínez Pillet"
    },
    {
      "name": "Bernhard Schölkopf"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/afcmxkrpb3509.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2610.32758",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "afcmxkrpb3509",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32758",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "LicenseRef-arXiv-nonexclusive-1.0",
  "licence_label": "arXiv licence",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "astro-ph.IM"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "astro-ph.SR"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cs.CV"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cs.LG"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "3103|Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7223651923",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.32758",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-23",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/afcmxkrpb3509.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:35:15Z",
      "native_id": "2610.32758",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32758"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "astronomy",
      "origin": "arxiv:astro-ph.IM",
      "subfield": "instrumentation-methods"
    },
    {
      "field": "astronomy",
      "origin": "arxiv:astro-ph.SR",
      "subfield": "stellar"
    }
  ],
  "title": "ARENA: Active Region attENtion Aggregation for interpretable solar flare prediction",
  "title_text": "ARENA: Active Region attENtion Aggregation for interpretable solar flare prediction",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:35:15Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/afcmxkrpb3509",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}