Learning to Retrieve for Environmental Knowledge Discovery: An Augmentation-Adaptive Self-Supervised Learning Framework

The discovery of environmental knowledge depends on labeled task-specific data, but is often constrained by the high cost of data collection. Existing machine learning approaches usually struggle to generalize in data-sparse or atypical conditions. To this end, we propose an Augmentation-Adaptive Self-Supervised Learning (A$^2$SL) framework, which retrieves relevant observational samples to enhance modeling of the target ecosystem. Specifically, we introduce a multi-level pairwise learning loss to train a scenario encoder that captures varying degrees of similarity among scenarios. These learned similarities drive a retrieval mechanism that supplements a target scenario with relevant data from different locations or time periods. Furthermore, to better handle variable scenarios, particularly under atypical or extreme conditions where traditional models struggle, we design an augmentation-adaptive mechanism that selectively enhances these scenarios through targeted data augmentation. Using freshwater ecosystems as a case study, we evaluate A$^2$SL in modeling water temperature and dissolved oxygen dynamics in real-world lakes. Experimental results show that A$^2$SL significantly improves predictive accuracy and enhances robustness in data-scarce and atypical scenarios. Although this study focuses on freshwater ecosystems, the A$^2$SL framework offers a broadly applicable solution in various scientific domains.

Hierarchical Conditional Multi-Task Learning for Streamflow Modeling

Streamflow, vital for water resource management, is governed by complex hydrological systems involving intermediate processes driven by meteorological forces. While deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art results of streamflow prediction, their end-to-end single-task learning approach often fails to capture the causal relationships within these systems. To address this, we propose Hierarchical Conditional Multi-Task Learning (HCMTL), a hierarchical approach that jointly models soil water and snowpack processes based on their causal connections to streamflow. HCMTL utilizes task embeddings to connect network modules, enhancing flexibility and expressiveness while capturing unobserved processes beyond soil water and snowpack. It also incorporates the Conditional Mini-Batch strategy to improve long time series modeling. We compare HCMTL with five baselines on a global dataset. HCMTL's superior performance across hundreds of drainage basins over extended periods shows that integrating domain-specific causal knowledge into deep learning enhances both prediction accuracy and interpretability. This is essential for advancing our understanding of complex hydrological systems and supporting efficient water resource management to mitigate natural disasters like droughts and floods.

Hierarchically Disentangled Recurrent Network for Factorizing System Dynamics of Multi-scale Systems

We present a knowledge-guided machine learning (KGML) framework for modeling multi-scale processes, and study its performance in the context of streamflow forecasting in hydrology. Specifically, we propose a novel hierarchical recurrent neural architecture that factorizes the system dynamics at multiple temporal scales and captures their interactions. This framework consists of an inverse and a forward model. The inverse model is used to empirically resolve the system's temporal modes from data (physical model simulations, observed data, or a combination of them from the past), and these states are then used in the forward model to predict streamflow. In a hydrological system, these modes can represent different processes, evolving at different temporal scales (e.g., slow: groundwater recharge and baseflow vs. fast: surface runoff due to extreme rainfall). A key advantage of our framework is that once trained, it can incorporate new observations into the model's context (internal state) without expensive optimization approaches (e.g., EnKF) that are traditionally used in physical sciences for data assimilation. Experiments with several river catchments from the NWS NCRFC region show the efficacy of this ML-based data assimilation framework compared to standard baselines, especially for basins that have a long history of observations. Even for basins that have a shorter observation history, we present two orthogonal strategies of training our FHNN framework: (a) using simulation data from imperfect simulations and (b) using observation data from multiple basins to build a global model. We show that both of these strategies (that can be used individually or together) are highly effective in mitigating the lack of training data. The improvement in forecast accuracy is particularly noteworthy for basins where local models perform poorly because of data sparsity.

Towards a Knowledge guided Multimodal Foundation Model for Spatio-Temporal Remote Sensing Applications

In recent years, there is increased interest in foundation models for geoscience due to vast amount of earth observing satellite imagery. Existing remote sensing foundation models make use of the various sources of spectral imagery to create large models pretrained on masked reconstruction task. The embeddings from these foundation models are then used for various downstream remote sensing applications. In this paper we propose a foundational modeling framework for remote sensing geoscience applications, that goes beyond these traditional single modality masked autoencoder family of foundation models. This framework leverages the knowledge guided principles that the spectral imagery captures the impact of the physical drivers on the environmental system, and that the relationship between them is governed by the characteristics of the system. Specifically, our method, called MultiModal Variable Step Forecasting (MM-VSF), uses mutlimodal data (spectral imagery and weather) as its input and a variable step forecasting task as its pretraining objective. In our evaluation we show forecasting of satellite imagery using weather can be used as an effective pretraining task for foundation models. We further show the effectiveness of the embeddings from MM-VSF on the downstream task of pixel wise crop mapping, when compared with a model trained in the traditional setting of single modality input and masked reconstruction based pretraining.

Multimodal Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution Using Linear Semantic Transfer and Mixed-Modality Ensembles

Event coreference resolution (ECR) is the task of determining whether distinct mentions of events within a multi-document corpus are actually linked to the same underlying occurrence. Images of the events can help facilitate resolution when language is ambiguous. Here, we propose a multimodal cross-document event coreference resolution method that integrates visual and textual cues with a simple linear map between vision and language models. As existing ECR benchmark datasets rarely provide images for all event mentions, we augment the popular ECB+ dataset with event-centric images scraped from the internet and generated using image diffusion models. We establish three methods that incorporate images and text for coreference: 1) a standard fused model with finetuning, 2) a novel linear mapping method without finetuning and 3) an ensembling approach based on splitting mention pairs by semantic and discourse-level difficulty. We evaluate on 2 datasets: the augmented ECB+, and AIDA Phase 1. Our ensemble systems using cross-modal linear mapping establish an upper limit (91.9 CoNLL F1) on ECB+ ECR performance given the preprocessing assumptions used, and establish a novel baseline on AIDA Phase 1. Our results demonstrate the utility of multimodal information in ECR for certain challenging coreference problems, and highlight a need for more multimodal resources in the coreference resolution space.

Combining Satellite and Weather Data for Crop Type Mapping: An Inverse Modelling Approach

Accurate and timely crop mapping is essential for yield estimation, insurance claims, and conservation efforts. Over the years, many successful machine learning models for crop mapping have been developed that use just the multi-spectral imagery from satellites to predict crop type over the area of interest. However, these traditional methods do not account for the physical processes that govern crop growth. At a high level, crop growth can be envisioned as physical parameters, such as weather and soil type, acting upon the plant leading to crop growth which can be observed via satellites. In this paper, we propose Weather-based Spatio-Temporal segmentation network with ATTention (WSTATT), a deep learning model that leverages this understanding of crop growth by formulating it as an inverse model that combines weather (Daymet) and satellite imagery (Sentinel-2) to generate accurate crop maps. We show that our approach provides significant improvements over existing algorithms that solely rely on spectral imagery by comparing segmentation maps and F1 classification scores. Furthermore, effective use of attention in WSTATT architecture enables detection of crop types earlier in the season (up to 5 months in advance), which is very useful for improving food supply projections. We finally discuss the impact of weather by correlating our results with crop phenology to show that WSTATT is able to capture physical properties of crop growth.

A BERT based Ensemble Approach for Sentiment Classification of Customer Reviews and its Application to Nudge Marketing in e-Commerce

According to the literature, Product reviews are an important source of information for customers to support their buying decision. Product reviews improve customer trust and loyalty. Reviews help customers in understanding what other customers think about a particular product and helps in driving purchase decisions. Therefore, for an e-commerce platform it is important to understand the sentiments in customer reviews to understand their products and services, and it also allows them to potentially create positive consumer interaction as well as long lasting relationships. Reviews also provide innovative ways to market the products for an ecommerce company. One such approach is Nudge Marketing. Nudge marketing is a subtle way for an ecommerce company to help their customers make better decisions without hesitation.

Task Aware Modulation using Representation Learning: An Approach for Few Shot Learning in Heterogeneous Systems

We present a Task-aware modulation using Representation Learning (TAM-RL) framework that enhances personalized predictions in few-shot settings for heterogeneous systems when individual task characteristics are not known. TAM-RL extracts embeddings representing the actual inherent characteristics of these entities and uses these characteristics to personalize the predictions for each entity/task. Using real-world hydrological and flux tower benchmark data sets, we show that TAM-RL can significantly outperform existing baseline approaches such as MAML and multi-modal MAML (MMAML) while being much faster and simpler to train due to less complexity. Specifically, TAM-RL eliminates the need for sensitive hyper-parameters like inner loop steps and inner loop learning rate, which are crucial for model convergence in MAML, MMAML. We further present an empirical evaluation via synthetic data to explore the impact of heterogeneity amongst the entities on the relative performance of MAML, MMAML, and TAM-RL. We show that TAM-RL significantly improves predictive performance for cases where it is possible to learn distinct representations for different tasks.

Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Models in Hydrology

In hydrology, modeling streamflow remains a challenging task due to the limited availability of basin characteristics information such as soil geology and geomorphology. These characteristics may be noisy due to measurement errors or may be missing altogether. To overcome this challenge, we propose a knowledge-guided, probabilistic inverse modeling method for recovering physical characteristics from streamflow and weather data, which are more readily available. We compare our framework with state-of-the-art inverse models for estimating river basin characteristics. We also show that these estimates offer improvement in streamflow modeling as opposed to using the original basin characteristic values. Our inverse model offers 3\% improvement in R$^2$ for the inverse model (basin characteristic estimation) and 6\% for the forward model (streamflow prediction). Our framework also offers improved explainability since it can quantify uncertainty in both the inverse and the forward model. Uncertainty quantification plays a pivotal role in improving the explainability of machine learning models by providing additional insights into the reliability and limitations of model predictions. In our analysis, we assess the quality of the uncertainty estimates. Compared to baseline uncertainty quantification methods, our framework offers 10\% improvement in the dispersion of epistemic uncertainty and 13\% improvement in coverage rate. This information can help stakeholders understand the level of uncertainty associated with the predictions and provide a more comprehensive view of the potential outcomes.

Koopman Invertible Autoencoder: Leveraging Forward and Backward Dynamics for Temporal Modeling

Accurate long-term predictions are the foundations for many machine learning applications and decision-making processes. However, building accurate long-term prediction models remains challenging due to the limitations of existing temporal models like recurrent neural networks (RNNs), as they capture only the statistical connections in the training data and may fail to learn the underlying dynamics of the target system. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel machine learning model based on Koopman operator theory, which we call Koopman Invertible Autoencoders (KIA), that captures the inherent characteristic of the system by modeling both forward and backward dynamics in the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. This enables us to efficiently learn low-dimensional representations, resulting in more accurate predictions of long-term system behavior. Moreover, our method's invertibility design guarantees reversibility and consistency in both forward and inverse operations. We illustrate the utility of KIA on pendulum and climate datasets, demonstrating 300% improvements in long-term prediction capability for pendulum while maintaining robustness against noise. Additionally, our method excels in long-term climate prediction, further validating our method's effectiveness.