LakeFM: Toward a Foundation Model for Aquatic Ecosystems Using Irregular Multivariate Multi-depth Time Series Data

Understanding and forecasting lake dynamics is critical for monitoring water quality and ecosystem health across lakes and reservoirs. While machine learning methods have been recently applied to ecological time-series data, existing works assume regular sampling in time and depth, and struggle to generalize across lakes with heterogeneous variables, depths, and observation patterns. To address these limitations, we introduce \textsc{LakeFM}, a foundation model for aquatic systems, pre-trained on large-scale ecological datasets comprising both simulated and observed lakes. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we show that \textsc{LakeFM} learns meaningful representations spanning broader lake-level characteristics, and achieves competitive or often superior-forecasting performance compared to existing time-series foundation and non-foundation models, while producing physically plausible predictions consistent with real-world lake dynamics.

Open World Scene Graph Generation using Vision Language Models

Scene-Graph Generation (SGG) seeks to recognize objects in an image and distill their salient pairwise relationships. Most methods depend on dataset-specific supervision to learn the variety of interactions, restricting their usefulness in open-world settings, involving novel objects and/or relations. Even methods that leverage large Vision Language Models (VLMs) typically require benchmark-specific fine-tuning. We introduce Open-World SGG, a training-free, efficient, model-agnostic framework that taps directly into the pretrained knowledge of VLMs to produce scene graphs with zero additional learning. Casting SGG as a zero-shot structured-reasoning problem, our method combines multimodal prompting, embedding alignment, and a lightweight pair-refinement strategy, enabling inference over unseen object vocabularies and relation sets. To assess this setting, we formalize an Open-World evaluation protocol that measures performance when no SGG-specific data have been observed either in terms of objects and relations. Experiments on Visual Genome, Open Images V6, and the Panoptic Scene Graph (PSG) dataset demonstrate the capacity of pretrained VLMs to perform relational understanding without task-level training.