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Applications · Physics

Sifan Wang, Jacob Seidman, Shyam Sankaran, Hanwen Wang, George Pappas, Paris Perdikaris

Operator learning, which aims to approximate maps between infinite-dimensional function spaces, is an important area in scientific machine learning with applications across various physical domains. Here we introduce the Continuous Vision Transformer (CViT), a novel neural operator architecture that leverages advances in computer vision to address challenges in learning complex physical systems. CViT combines a vision transformer encoder, a novel grid-based coordinate embedding, and a query-wise cross-attention mechanism to effectively capture multi-scale dependencies. This design allows for flexible output representations and consistent evaluation at arbitrary resolutions. We demonstrate CViT's effectiveness across a diverse range of partial differential equation (PDE) systems, including fluid dynamics, climate modeling, and reaction-diffusion processes. Our comprehensive experiments show that CViT achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, often surpassing larger foundation models, even without extensive pretraining and roll-out fine-tuning. Taken together, CViT exhibits robust handling of discontinuous solutions, multi-scale features, and intricate spatio-temporal dynamics. Our contributions can be viewed as a significant step towards adapting advanced computer vision architectures for building more flexible and accurate machine learning models in the physical sciences.

Reinforcement Learning · Multi-agent

Xiaoxuan Hou, Jiayi Yuan, Joel Z Leibo, Natasha Jaques

**InvestESG** is a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) benchmark designed to study the impact of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure mandates on corporate climate investments. The benchmark models an intertemporal social dilemma where companies balance short-term profit losses from climate mitigation efforts and long-term benefits from reducing climate risk, while ESG-conscious investors attempt to influence corporate behavior through their investment decisions. Companies allocate capital across mitigation, greenwashing, and resilience, with varying strategies influencing climate outcomes and investor preferences. We are releasing open-source versions of InvestESG in both PyTorch and JAX, which enable scalable and hardware-accelerated simulations for investigating competing incentives in mitigate climate change. Our experiments show that without ESG-conscious investors with sufficient capital, corporate mitigation efforts remain limited under the disclosure mandate. However, when a critical mass of investors prioritizes ESG, corporate cooperation increases, which in turn reduces climate risks and enhances long-term financial stability. Additionally, providing more information about global climate risks encourages companies to invest more in mitigation, even without investor involvement. Our findings align with empirical research using real-world data, highlighting MARL's potential to inform policy by providing insights into large-scale socio-economic challenges through efficient testing of alternative policy and market designs.

Applications · Physics

Xiaoyuan Cheng, Yi He, Yiming Yang, Xiao Xue, Sibo Cheng, Daniel Giles, Xiaohang Tang, Yukun Hu

Learning long-term behaviors in chaotic dynamical systems, such as turbulent flows and climate modelling, is challenging due to their inherent instability and unpredictability. These systems exhibit positive Lyapunov exponents, which significantly hinder accurate long-term forecasting. As a result, understanding long-term statistical behavior is far more valuable than focusing on short-term accuracy. While autoregressive deep sequence models have been applied to capture long-term behavior, they often lead to exponentially increasing errors in learned dynamics. To address this, we shift the focus from simple prediction errors to preserving an invariant measure in dissipative chaotic systems. These systems have attractors, where trajectories settle, and the invariant measure is the probability distribution on attractors that remains unchanged under dynamics. Existing methods generate long trajectories of dissipative chaotic systems by aligning invariant measures, but it is not always possible to obtain invariant measures for arbitrary datasets. We propose the Poincaré Flow Neural Network (PFNN), a novel operator learning framework designed to capture behaviors of chaotic systems without any explicit knowledge of the invariant measure. PFNN employs an auto-encoder to map the chaotic system to a finite-dimensional feature space, effectively linearizing the chaotic evolution. It then learns the linear evolution operators to match the physical dynamics by addressing two critical properties in dissipative chaotic systems: (1) contraction, the system’s convergence toward its attractors, and (2) measure invariance, trajectories on the attractors following a probability distribution invariant to the dynamics. Our experiments on a variety of chaotic systems, including Lorenz systems, Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation and Navier–Stokes equation, demonstrate that PFNN has more accurate predictions and physical statistics compared to competitive baselines including the Fourier Neural Operator and the Markov Neural Operator.

Probabilistic Methods · Monte Carlo and Sampling Methods

Byoungwoo Park, Hyungi Lee, Juho Lee

Many real-world datasets, such as healthcare, climate, and economics, are often collected as irregular time series, which poses challenges for accurate modeling. In this paper, we propose the Amortized Control of continuous State Space Model (ACSSM) for continuous dynamical modeling of time series for irregular and discrete observations. We first present a multi-marginal Doob's $h$-transform to construct a continuous dynamical system conditioned on these irregular observations. Following this, we introduce a variational inference algorithm with a tight evidence lower bound (ELBO), leveraging stochastic optimal control (SOC) theory to approximate the intractable Doob's $h$-transform and simulate the conditioned dynamics. To improve efficiency and scalability during both training and inference, ACSSM leverages auxiliary variable to flexibly parameterize the latent dynamics and amortized control. Additionally, it incorporates a simulation-free latent dynamics framework and a transformer-based data assimilation scheme, facilitating parallel inference of the latent states and ELBO computation. Through empirical evaluations across a variety of real-world datasets, ACSSM demonstrates superior performance in tasks such as classification, regression, interpolation, and extrapolation, while maintaining computational efficiency.

Probabilistic Methods · Monte Carlo and Sampling Methods

Byoungwoo Park, Hyungi Lee, Juho Lee

Many real-world datasets, such as healthcare, climate, and economics, are often collected as irregular time series, which poses challenges for accurate modeling. In this paper, we propose the Amortized Control of continuous State Space Model (ACSSM) for continuous dynamical modeling of time series for irregular and discrete observations. We first present a multi-marginal Doob's $h$-transform to construct a continuous dynamical system conditioned on these irregular observations. Following this, we introduce a variational inference algorithm with a tight evidence lower bound (ELBO), leveraging stochastic optimal control (SOC) theory to approximate the intractable Doob's $h$-transform and simulate the conditioned dynamics. To improve efficiency and scalability during both training and inference, ACSSM leverages auxiliary variable to flexibly parameterize the latent dynamics and amortized control. Additionally, it incorporates a simulation-free latent dynamics framework and a transformer-based data assimilation scheme, facilitating parallel inference of the latent states and ELBO computation. Through empirical evaluations across a variety of real-world datasets, ACSSM demonstrates superior performance in tasks such as classification, regression, interpolation, and extrapolation, while maintaining computational efficiency.

Applications · Physics

Wenhan Gao, Ruichen Xu, Yuefan Deng, Yi Liu

In recent years, neural operators have emerged as a prominent approach for learning mappings between function spaces, such as the solution operators of parametric PDEs. A notable example is the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), which models the integral kernel as a convolution operator and uses the Convolution Theorem to learn the kernel directly in the frequency domain. The parameters are decoupled from the resolution of the data, allowing the FNO to take inputs of different resolutions.However, training at a lower resolution and inferring at a finer resolution does not guarantee consistent performance, nor can fine details, present only in fine-scale data, be learned solely from coarse data. In this work, we address this misconception by defining and examining the discretization mismatch error: the discrepancy between the outputs of the neural operator when using different discretizations of the input data. We demonstrate that neural operators may suffer from discretization mismatch errors that hinder their effectiveness when inferred on data with resolutions different from that of the training data or when trained on data with varying resolutions. As neural operators underpin many critical cross-resolution scientific tasks, such as climate modeling and fluid dynamics, understanding discretization mismatch errors is essential. Based on our findings, we propose a Cross-Resolution Operator-learning Pipeline that is free of aliasing and discretization mismatch errors, enabling efficient cross-resolution and multi-spatial-scale learning, and resulting in superior performance.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Veeramakali Vignesh Manivannan, Yasaman Jafari, Srikar Eranky, Spencer Ho, Rose Yu, Duncan Watson-Parris, Yian Ma, Leon Bergen, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in climate science has recently gained significant attention. However, a critical issue remains: the lack of a comprehensive evaluation framework capable of assessing the quality and scientific validity of model outputs. To address this issue, we develop *ClimaGen* (Climate QA Generator), an adaptive learning framework that generates question-answer pairs from graduate textbooks with climate scientists in the loop. As a result, we present *ClimaQA-Gold*, an expert-annotated benchmark dataset alongside *ClimaQA-Silver*, a large-scale, comprehensive synthetic QA dataset for climate science. Finally, we develop evaluation strategies and compare different LLMs on our benchmarks. Our results offer novel insights into various approaches used to enhance knowledge of climate LLMs. ClimaQA’s source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Rose-STL-Lab/genie-climaqa

Yang Liu, Zinan Zheng, Jiashun Cheng, Fugee Tsung, Deli Zhao, Yu Rong, Jia Li

Accurate Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) climate forecasting is pivotal for decision-making including agriculture planning and disaster preparedness but is known to be challenging due to its chaotic nature. Although recent data-driven models have shown promising results, their performance is limited by inadequate consideration of geometric inductive biases. Usually, they treat the spherical weather data as planar images, resulting in an inaccurate representation of locations and spatial relations. In this work, we propose the geometric-inspired Circular Transformer (CirT) to model the cyclic characteristic of the graticule, consisting of two key designs: (1) Decomposing the weather data by latitude into circular patches that serve as input tokens to the Transformer; (2) Leveraging Fourier transform in self-attention to capture the global information and model the spatial periodicity. Extensive experiments on the Earth Reanalysis 5 (ERA5) reanalysis dataset demonstrate our model yields a significant improvement over the advanced data-driven models, including PanguWeather and GraphCast, as well as skillful ECMWF systems. Additionally, we empirically show the effectiveness of our model designs and high-quality prediction over spatial and temporal dimensions.

Aryamaan Jain, Bedrich Benes, Guillaume Cordonnier

Erosion simulation is a common approach used for generating and authoring mountainous terrains. While water is considered the primary erosion factor, its simulation fails to capture steep slopes near the ridges. In these low-drainage areas, erosion is often approximated with slope-reducing erosion, which yields unrealistically uniform slopes. However, geomorphology observed that another process dominates the low-drainage areas: erosion by debris flow, which is a mixture of mud and rocks triggered by strong climatic events. We propose a new method to capture the interactions between debris flow and fluvial erosion thanks to a new mathematical formulation for debris flow erosion derived from geomorphology and a unified GPU algorithm for erosion and deposition. In particular, we observe that sediment and debris deposition tend to intersect river paths, which motivates the design of a new, approximate flow routing algorithm on the GPU to estimate the water path out of these newly formed depressions. We demonstrate that debris flow carves distinct patterns in the form of erosive scars on steep slopes and cones of deposited debris competing with fluvial erosion downstream.

ZOUBIDA AMEUR, Claire-Helene Demarty, Olivier LE MEUR, Daniel Menard

The consumption of a video requires a considerable amount of energy during the various stages of its life-cycle. With a billion hours of video consumed daily, this contributes significantly to the greenhouse gas emission. Therefore, reducing the end-to-end carbon footprint of the video chain, while preserving the quality of experience at the user side, is of high importance. To contribute in an impactful manner, we propose 3R-INN, a single light invertible network that does three tasks at once: given a high-resolution grainy image, it Rescales it to a lower resolution, Removes film grain and Reduces its power consumption when displayed. Providing such a minimum viable quality content contributes to reducing the energy consumption during encoding, transmission, decoding and display. 3R-INN also offers the possibility to restore either the high-resolution grainy original image or a grain-free version, thanks to its invertibility and the disentanglement of the high frequency, and without transmitting auxiliary data. Experiments show that, while enabling significant energy savings for encoding (78%), decoding (77%) and rendering (5% to 20%), 3R-INN outperforms state-of-the-art film grain synthesis and energy-aware methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the rescaling task on different test-sets.

Han Wang 0053, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Online memes have emerged as powerful digital cultural artifacts in the age of social media, offering not only humor but also platforms for political discourse, social critique, and information dissemination. Their extensive reach and influence in shaping online communities' sentiments make them invaluable tools for campaigning and promoting ideologies. Despite the development of several meme generation tools, there remains a gap in their systematic evaluation and their ability to effectively communicate ideologies. Addressing this, we introduce MemeCraft, an innovative meme generator that leverages large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) to produce memes advocating specific social movements. MemeCraft presents an end-to-end pipeline, transforming user prompts into compelling multimodal memes without manual intervention. Conscious of the misuse potential in creating divisive content, an intrinsic safety mechanism is embedded to curb hateful meme production. Our assessment, focusing on two UN Sustainable Development Goals-Climate Action and Gender Equality-shows MemeCraft's prowess in creating memes that are both funny and supportive of advocacy goals. This paper highlights how generative AI can promote social good and pioneers the use of LLMs and VLMs in meme generation.

Bowen Chen 0003, Gillian Dobbie, Neelesh Rampal, Yun Sing Koh

In the face of rising surface temperatures from climate change, impacting biodiversity, extreme weather events, and agricultural productivity, understanding the drivers behind temperature changes is imperative. Traditional global climate models (GCMs) are computationally expensive, limiting their applicability, while machine learning approaches, though promising, face interpretability challenges due to their "black box" nature, especially in a dynamic setting where the data is constantly evolving. We propose DUO, a framework to identify shifts in important features and feature combinations as the data distribution changes over time. Our model independently assesses the importance of features and their interactions while also evaluating their relevance when combined with additional features, contributing to the target class. As a case study, we apply DUO to assess the shifts in climate drivers for station-level temperatures in six locations across New Zealand from 1980 to 2020, we identify specific humidity, geopotential height, and air temperature at high atmospheric pressure levels as the most important features for describing temperature variability. By revealing how climate drivers change over time, DUO contributes to a deeper understanding of temperature change patterns, enabling practitioners to develop targeted and adaptive mitigation strategies.

Zhe Jiang 0001, Liang Zhao 0002, Xun Zhou 0001, Junbo Zhang 0004, Shashi Shekhar 0001, Jieping Ye

Over the last decades, a rapidly growing volume of spatiotemporal data has been collected from smartphones and GPS, terrestrial, seaborne, airborne, and spaceborne sensors, as well as computational simulations. Meanwhile, advances in deep learning technologies, especially the recent breakthroughs of generative AI and foundation models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision Models (LVMs), have achieved tremendous success in natural language processing and computer vision applications. There is growing anticipation of the same level of accomplishment of AI on spatiotemporal data in tackling grand societal challenges, such as national water resource management, monitoring coastal hazards, energy and food security, as well as mitigation and adaptation to climate change. When deep learning, especially emerging foundation models, intersects spatiotemporal data in scientific domains, it opens up new opportunities and challenges. The workshop aims to bring together academic researchers in both AI and scientific domains, government program managers, leaders from non-profit organizations, as well as industry executives to brainstorm and debate on the emerging opportunities and novel challenges of deep learning (foundation models) for spatiotemporal data inspired by real-world scientific applications.

Emre Eftelioglu, Bistra Dilkina, Naoki Abe, Ramakrishnan Kannan, Yuzhou Chen, Yulia R. Gel, Kathleen Buckingham, Auroop R. Ganguly, James Hodson 0003, Jiafu Mao

The Fragile Earth Workshop is a recurring event in ACM's KDD Conference on research in knowledge discovery and data mining that gathers the research community to find and explore how data science can measure and progress climate and social issues, following the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework.

Yi Xie 0003, Tianyu Qiu, Yun Xiong, Xiuqi Huang, Xiaofeng Gao 0001, Chao Chen 0004, Qiang Wang 0066, Haihong Li

Urban public nuisance events, like garbage exposure, illegal parking, facilities damage, and etc., impair the quality of life for city residents. Predicting and controlling these nuisances is crucial but complicated due to their ties to subjective and psychological factors. In this study, we reveal a significant correlation between such nuisances and meteorological indicators, influenced by the impact of climate on people's psychological states. We employ meteorology predictions that are integrated in Hawkes processes to enhance the accuracy of predicting the category and timing of these nuisances. To this end, we propose Spatial-Temporal Two-Tower Transformer (ST-T3), which simultaneously considers spatial data and further improves the prediction accuracy. Evaluated by about three-year data from both downtown and suburban Shanghai, our method outperforms both traditional and advanced prediction systems. We share a portion of the de-identified dataset for open research.

Fudong Lin, Kaleb Guillot, Summer Crawford, Yihe Zhang 0001, Xu Yuan 0001, Nian-Feng Tzeng

Precise crop yield predictions are of national importance for ensuring food security and sustainable agricultural practices. While AI-for-science approaches have exhibited promising achievements in solving many scientific problems such as drug discovery, precipitation nowcasting, etc., the development of deep learning models for predicting crop yields is constantly hindered by the lack of an open and large-scale deep learning-ready dataset with multiple modalities to accommodate sufficient information. To remedy this, we introduce the CropNet dataset, the first terabyte-sized, publicly available, and multi-modal dataset specifically targeting climate change-aware crop yield predictions for the contiguous United States (U.S.) continent at the county level. Our CropNet dataset is composed of three modalities of data, i.e., Sentinel-2 Imagery, WRF-HRRR Computed Dataset, and USDA Crop Dataset, for over 2200 U.S. counties spanning 6 years (2017-2022), expected to facilitate researchers in developing versatile deep learning models for timely and precisely predicting crop yields at the county-level, by accounting for the effects of both short-term growing season weather variations and long-term climate change on crop yields. Besides, we develop the CropNet package, offering three types of APIs, for facilitating researchers in downloading the CropNet data on the fly over the time and region of interest, and flexibly building their deep learning models for accurate crop yield predictions. Extensive experiments have been conducted on our CropNet dataset via employing various types of deep learning solutions, with the results validating the general applicability and the efficacy of the CropNet dataset in climate change-aware crop yield predictions. We have officially released our CropNet dataset on Hugging Face Datasets https://huggingface.co/datasets/CropNet/CropNet and our CropNet package on the Python Package Index (PyPI) https://pypi.org/project/cropnet. Code and tutorials are available at https://github.com/fudong03/CropNet.

Han Wang, Wenhao Li, Hongyuan Zha, Baoxiang Wang

A carbon market is a market-based tool that incentivizes economic agents to align individual profits with the global utility, i.e., reducing carbon emissions to tackle climate change. Cap and trade stands as a critical principle based on allocating and trading carbon allowances (carbon emission credit), enabling economic agents to follow planned emissions and penalizing excess emissions. A central authority is responsible for introducing and allocating those allowances in cap and trade. However, the complexity of carbon market dynamics makes accurate simulation intractable, which in turn hinders the design of effective allocation strategies. To address this, we propose an adaptive mechanism design framework, simulating the market using hierarchical, model-free multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Government agents allocate carbon credits, while enterprises engage in economic activities and carbon trading. This framework illustrates agents’ behavior comprehensively. Numerical results show MARL enables government agents to balance productivity, equality, and carbon emissions. Our project is available at https: //anonymous.4open.science/r/Carbon-Simulator.

Xiyuan Zhang, Ranak Roy Chowdhury, Rajesh K. Gupta, Jingbo Shang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen significant use in domains such as natural language processing and computer vision. Going beyond text, image and graphics, LLMs present a significant potential for analysis of time series data, benefiting domains such as climate, IoT, healthcare, traffic, audio and finance. This survey paper provides an in-depth exploration and a detailed taxonomy of the various methodologies employed to harness the power of LLMs for time series analysis. We address the inherent challenge of bridging the gap between LLMs' original text data training and the numerical nature of time series data, and explore strategies for transferring and distilling knowledge from LLMs to numerical time series analysis. We detail various methodologies, including (1) direct prompting of LLMs, (2) time series quantization, (3) aligning techniques, (4) utilization of the vision modality as a bridging mechanism, and (5) the combination of LLMs with tools. Additionally, this survey offers a comprehensive overview of the existing multimodal time series and text datasets in diverse domains, and discusses the challenges and future opportunities of this emerging field.

Karandeep Singh, Chaeyoon Jeong, Naufal Shidqi, Sungwon Park, Arjun Nellikkattil, Elke Zeller, Meeyoung Cha

Climate change is one of the most critical challenges that our planet is facing today. Rising global temperatures are already affecting Earth's weather and climate patterns with an increased frequency of unpredictable and extreme events. Future projections for climate change research are based on computer models like Earth System Models (ESMs). Climate simulations typically run on a coarser grid due to the high computational resources required, and then undergo a lighter downscaling process to obtain data on a finer grid. This work presents a self-supervised deep learning model that does not require high resolution ground truth data for downscaling. This is realized by leveraging salient distribution patterns and the hidden dependencies between weather variables for an individual data point at runtime. We propose three climate-specific components that well represent the patterns of underlying weather variables and learn intricate inter-variable dependencies. Extensive evaluation with 2x, 3x, and 4x scaling factors demonstrates that our model obtains 8% to 47% performance gain over existing baselines while greatly reducing the overall runtime. The improved performance and no dependence on high resolution ground truth data make our method a valuable tool for future climate research.

Rui Mao, Qika Lin, Qiawen Liu, Gianmarco Mengaldo, Erik Cambria

Extreme weather can lead to weather-induced disasters. These have a profound impact on communities worldwide, causing loss of life, damage to properties and infrastructure, and disruption of daily activities. In alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, addressing the increasing frequency and severity of these events, exacerbated by climate change, is imperative. Exploring public perception and responses to weather disasters becomes crucial for policymakers to formulate effective strategies that not only mitigate the impacts but also contribute to the goal of ensuring sustainable and resilient communities. Social media, as a pervasive and real-time communication platform, has gathered a large amount of public opinion. In this work, we analyze public perception towards weather disasters based on tweets and metaphors. Metaphor, as a linguistic device, plays a pivotal role in unraveling cognitive processes and understanding how individuals perceive and make sense of concepts. We focus on tweets related to four distinct types of weather disasters i.e., floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires, aiming to extract nuanced insights regarding public perceptions, concerns, and attitudes towards these specific events. We also deliver constructive recommendations, based on the insights.