Align-DA: Align Score-based Atmospheric Data Assimilation with Multiple Preferences

Data assimilation (DA) aims to estimate the full state of a dynamical system by combining partial and noisy observations with a prior model forecast, commonly referred to as the background. In atmospheric applications, this problem is fundamentally ill-posed due to the sparsity of observations relative to the high-dimensional state space. Traditional methods address this challenge by simplifying background priors to regularize the solution, which are empirical and require continual tuning for application. Inspired by alignment techniques in text-to-image diffusion models, we propose Align-DA, which formulates DA as a generative process and uses reward signals to guide background priors, replacing manual tuning with data-driven alignment. Specifically, we train a score-based model in the latent space to approximate the background-conditioned prior, and align it using three complementary reward signals for DA: (1) assimilation accuracy, (2) forecast skill initialized from the assimilated state, and (3) physical adherence of the analysis fields. Experiments with multiple reward signals demonstrate consistent improvements in analysis quality across different evaluation metrics and observation-guidance strategies. These results show that preference alignment, implemented as a soft constraint, can automatically adapt complex background priors tailored to DA, offering a promising new direction for advancing the field.

Satellite Observations Guided Diffusion Model for Accurate Meteorological States at Arbitrary Resolution

Accurate acquisition of surface meteorological conditions at arbitrary locations holds significant importance for weather forecasting and climate simulation. Due to the fact that meteorological states derived from satellite observations are often provided in the form of low-resolution grid fields, the direct application of spatial interpolation to obtain meteorological states for specific locations often results in significant discrepancies when compared to actual observations. Existing downscaling methods for acquiring meteorological state information at higher resolutions commonly overlook the correlation with satellite observations. To bridge the gap, we propose Satellite-observations Guided Diffusion Model (SGD), a conditional diffusion model pre-trained on ERA5 reanalysis data with satellite observations (GridSat) as conditions, which is employed for sampling downscaled meteorological states through a zero-shot guided sampling strategy and patch-based methods. During the training process, we propose to fuse the information from GridSat satellite observations into ERA5 maps via the attention mechanism, enabling SGD to generate atmospheric states that align more accurately with actual conditions. In the sampling, we employed optimizable convolutional kernels to simulate the upscale process, thereby generating high-resolution ERA5 maps using low-resolution ERA5 maps as well as observations from weather stations as guidance. Moreover, our devised patch-based method promotes SGD to generate meteorological states at arbitrary resolutions. Experiments demonstrate SGD fulfills accurate meteorological states downscaling to 6.25km.

Scale- and Context-Aware Convolutional Non-intrusive Load Monitoring

Non-intrusive load monitoring addresses the challenging task of decomposing the aggregate signal of a household's electricity consumption into appliance-level data without installing dedicated meters. By detecting load malfunction and recommending energy reduction programs, cost-effective non-intrusive load monitoring provides intelligent demand-side management for utilities and end users. In this paper, we boost the accuracy of energy disaggregation with a novel neural network structure named scale- and context-aware network, which exploits multi-scale features and contextual information. Specifically, we develop a multi-branch architecture with multiple receptive field sizes and branch-wise gates that connect the branches in the sub-networks. We build a self-attention module to facilitate the integration of global context, and we incorporate an adversarial loss and on-state augmentation to further improve the model's performance. Extensive simulation results tested on open datasets corroborate the merits of the proposed approach, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.