Climate Variable Downscaling with Conditional Normalizing Flows

Predictions of global climate models typically operate on coarse spatial scales due to the large computational costs of climate simulations. This has led to a considerable interest in methods for statistical downscaling, a similar process to super-resolution in the computer vision context, to provide more local and regional climate information. In this work, we apply conditional normalizing flows to the task of climate variable downscaling. We showcase its successful performance on an ERA5 water content dataset for different upsampling factors. Additionally, we show that the method allows us to assess the predictive uncertainty in terms of standard deviation from the fitted conditional distribution mean.

Simultaneous linear connectivity of neural networks modulo permutation

Neural networks typically exhibit permutation symmetries which contribute to the non-convexity of the networks' loss landscapes, since linearly interpolating between two permuted versions of a trained network tends to encounter a high loss barrier. Recent work has argued that permutation symmetries are the only sources of non-convexity, meaning there are essentially no such barriers between trained networks if they are permuted appropriately. In this work, we refine these arguments into three distinct claims of increasing strength. We show that existing evidence only supports "weak linear connectivity"-that for each pair of networks belonging to a set of SGD solutions, there exist (multiple) permutations that linearly connect it with the other networks. In contrast, the claim "strong linear connectivity"-that for each network, there exists one permutation that simultaneously connects it with the other networks-is both intuitively and practically more desirable. This stronger claim would imply that the loss landscape is convex after accounting for permutation, and enable linear interpolation between three or more independently trained models without increased loss. In this work, we introduce an intermediate claim-that for certain sequences of networks, there exists one permutation that simultaneously aligns matching pairs of networks from these sequences. Specifically, we discover that a single permutation aligns sequences of iteratively trained as well as iteratively pruned networks, meaning that two networks exhibit low loss barriers at each step of their optimization and sparsification trajectories respectively. Finally, we provide the first evidence that strong linear connectivity may be possible under certain conditions, by showing that barriers decrease with increasing network width when interpolating among three networks.

Predicting Species Occurrence Patterns from Partial Observations

To address the interlinked biodiversity and climate crises, we need an understanding of where species occur and how these patterns are changing. However, observational data on most species remains very limited, and the amount of data available varies greatly between taxonomic groups. We introduce the problem of predicting species occurrence patterns given (a) satellite imagery, and (b) known information on the occurrence of other species. To evaluate algorithms on this task, we introduce SatButterfly, a dataset of satellite images, environmental data and observational data for butterflies, which is designed to pair with the existing SatBird dataset of bird observational data. To address this task, we propose a general model, R-Tran, for predicting species occurrence patterns that enables the use of partial observational data wherever found. We find that R-Tran outperforms other methods in predicting species encounter rates with partial information both within a taxon (birds) and across taxa (birds and butterflies). Our approach opens new perspectives to leveraging insights from species with abundant data to other species with scarce data, by modelling the ecosystems in which they co-occur.

Application-Driven Innovation in Machine Learning

As applications of machine learning proliferate, innovative algorithms inspired by specific real-world challenges have become increasingly important. Such work offers the potential for significant impact not merely in domains of application but also in machine learning itself. In this paper, we describe the paradigm of application-driven research in machine learning, contrasting it with the more standard paradigm of methods-driven research. We illustrate the benefits of application-driven machine learning and how this approach can productively synergize with methods-driven work. Despite these benefits, we find that reviewing, hiring, and teaching practices in machine learning often hold back application-driven innovation. We outline how these processes may be improved.

Dataset Difficulty and the Role of Inductive Bias

Motivated by the goals of dataset pruning and defect identification, a growing body of methods have been developed to score individual examples within a dataset. These methods, which we call "example difficulty scores", are typically used to rank or categorize examples, but the consistency of rankings between different training runs, scoring methods, and model architectures is generally unknown. To determine how example rankings vary due to these random and controlled effects, we systematically compare different formulations of scores over a range of runs and model architectures. We find that scores largely share the following traits: they are noisy over individual runs of a model, strongly correlated with a single notion of difficulty, and reveal examples that range from being highly sensitive to insensitive to the inductive biases of certain model architectures. Drawing from statistical genetics, we develop a simple method for fingerprinting model architectures using a few sensitive examples. These findings guide practitioners in maximizing the consistency of their scores (e.g. by choosing appropriate scoring methods, number of runs, and subsets of examples), and establishes comprehensive baselines for evaluating scores in the future.

FoMo-Bench: a multi-modal, multi-scale and multi-task Forest Monitoring Benchmark for remote sensing foundation models

Forests are an essential part of Earth's ecosystems and natural systems, as well as providing services on which humanity depends, yet they are rapidly changing as a result of land use decisions and climate change. Understanding and mitigating negative effects requires parsing data on forests at global scale from a broad array of sensory modalities, and recently many such problems have been approached using machine learning algorithms for remote sensing. To date, forest-monitoring problems have largely been approached in isolation. Inspired by the rise of foundation models for computer vision and remote sensing, we here present the first unified Forest Monitoring Benchmark (FoMo-Bench). FoMo-Bench consists of 15 diverse datasets encompassing satellite, aerial, and inventory data, covering a variety of geographical regions, and including multispectral, red-green-blue, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and LiDAR data with various temporal, spatial and spectral resolutions. FoMo-Bench includes multiple types of forest-monitoring tasks, spanning classification, segmentation, and object detection. To further enhance the diversity of tasks and geographies represented in FoMo-Bench, we introduce a novel global dataset, TalloS, combining satellite imagery with ground-based annotations for tree species classification, spanning 1,000+ hierarchical taxonomic levels (species, genus, family). Finally, we propose FoMo-Net, a foundation model baseline designed for forest monitoring with the flexibility to process any combination of commonly used sensors in remote sensing. This work aims to inspire research collaborations between machine learning and forest biology researchers in exploring scalable multi-modal and multi-task models for forest monitoring. All code and data will be made publicly available.

Towards Causal Representations of Climate Model Data

Climate models, such as Earth system models (ESMs), are crucial for simulating future climate change based on projected Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. While ESMs are sophisticated and invaluable, machine learning-based emulators trained on existing simulation data can project additional climate scenarios much faster and are computationally efficient. However, they often lack generalizability and interpretability. This work delves into the potential of causal representation learning, specifically the \emph{Causal Discovery with Single-parent Decoding} (CDSD) method, which could render climate model emulation efficient \textit{and} interpretable. We evaluate CDSD on multiple climate datasets, focusing on emissions, temperature, and precipitation. Our findings shed light on the challenges, limitations, and promise of using CDSD as a stepping stone towards more interpretable and robust climate model emulation.

ClimateSet: A Large-Scale Climate Model Dataset for Machine Learning

Climate models have been key for assessing the impact of climate change and simulating future climate scenarios. The machine learning (ML) community has taken an increased interest in supporting climate scientists' efforts on various tasks such as climate model emulation, downscaling, and prediction tasks. Many of those tasks have been addressed on datasets created with single climate models. However, both the climate science and ML communities have suggested that to address those tasks at scale, we need large, consistent, and ML-ready climate model datasets. Here, we introduce ClimateSet, a dataset containing the inputs and outputs of 36 climate models from the Input4MIPs and CMIP6 archives. In addition, we provide a modular dataset pipeline for retrieving and preprocessing additional climate models and scenarios. We showcase the potential of our dataset by using it as a benchmark for ML-based climate model emulation. We gain new insights about the performance and generalization capabilities of the different ML models by analyzing their performance across different climate models. Furthermore, the dataset can be used to train an ML emulator on several climate models instead of just one. Such a "super emulator" can quickly project new climate change scenarios, complementing existing scenarios already provided to policymakers. We believe ClimateSet will create the basis needed for the ML community to tackle climate-related tasks at scale.

OpenForest: A data catalogue for machine learning in forest monitoring

Forests play a crucial role in Earth's system processes and provide a suite of social and economic ecosystem services, but are significantly impacted by human activities, leading to a pronounced disruption of the equilibrium within ecosystems. Advancing forest monitoring worldwide offers advantages in mitigating human impacts and enhancing our comprehension of forest composition, alongside the effects of climate change. While statistical modeling has traditionally found applications in forest biology, recent strides in machine learning and computer vision have reached important milestones using remote sensing data, such as tree species identification, tree crown segmentation and forest biomass assessments. For this, the significance of open access data remains essential in enhancing such data-driven algorithms and methodologies. Here, we provide a comprehensive and extensive overview of 86 open access forest datasets across spatial scales, encompassing inventories, ground-based, aerial-based, satellite-based recordings, and country or world maps. These datasets are grouped in OpenForest, a dynamic catalogue open to contributions that strives to reference all available open access forest datasets. Moreover, in the context of these datasets, we aim to inspire research in machine learning applied to forest biology by establishing connections between contemporary topics, perspectives and challenges inherent in both domains. We hope to encourage collaborations among scientists, fostering the sharing and exploration of diverse datasets through the application of machine learning methods for large-scale forest monitoring. OpenForest is available at https://github.com/RolnickLab/OpenForest .

SatBird: Bird Species Distribution Modeling with Remote Sensing and Citizen Science Data

Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, impacting ecosystem services necessary to ensure food, water, and human health and well-being. Understanding the distribution of species and their habitats is crucial for conservation policy planning. However, traditional methods in ecology for species distribution models (SDMs) generally focus either on narrow sets of species or narrow geographical areas and there remain significant knowledge gaps about the distribution of species. A major reason for this is the limited availability of data traditionally used, due to the prohibitive amount of effort and expertise required for traditional field monitoring. The wide availability of remote sensing data and the growing adoption of citizen science tools to collect species observations data at low cost offer an opportunity for improving biodiversity monitoring and enabling the modelling of complex ecosystems. We introduce a novel task for mapping bird species to their habitats by predicting species encounter rates from satellite images, and present SatBird, a satellite dataset of locations in the USA with labels derived from presence-absence observation data from the citizen science database eBird, considering summer (breeding) and winter seasons. We also provide a dataset in Kenya representing low-data regimes. We additionally provide environmental data and species range maps for each location. We benchmark a set of baselines on our dataset, including SOTA models for remote sensing tasks. SatBird opens up possibilities for scalably modelling properties of ecosystems worldwide.