LITE: Modeling Environmental Ecosystems with Multimodal Large Language Models

The modeling of environmental ecosystems plays a pivotal role in the sustainable management of our planet. Accurate prediction of key environmental variables over space and time can aid in informed policy and decision-making, thus improving people's livelihood. Recently, deep learning-based methods have shown promise in modeling the spatial-temporal relationships for predicting environmental variables. However, these approaches often fall short in handling incomplete features and distribution shifts, which are commonly observed in environmental data due to the substantial cost of data collection and malfunctions in measuring instruments. To address these issues, we propose LITE -- a multimodal large language model for environmental ecosystems modeling. Specifically, LITE unifies different environmental variables by transforming them into natural language descriptions and line graph images. Then, LITE utilizes unified encoders to capture spatial-temporal dynamics and correlations in different modalities. During this step, the incomplete features are imputed by a sparse Mixture-of-Experts framework, and the distribution shift is handled by incorporating multi-granularity information from past observations. Finally, guided by domain instructions, a language model is employed to fuse the multimodal representations for the prediction. Our experiments demonstrate that LITE significantly enhances performance in environmental spatial-temporal prediction across different domains compared to the best baseline, with a 41.25% reduction in prediction error. This justifies its effectiveness. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/hrlics/LITE.

FREE: The Foundational Semantic Recognition for Modeling Environmental Ecosystems

Modeling environmental ecosystems is critical for the sustainability of our planet, but is extremely challenging due to the complex underlying processes driven by interactions amongst a large number of physical variables. As many variables are difficult to measure at large scales, existing works often utilize a combination of observable features and locally available measurements or modeled values as input to build models for a specific study region and time period. This raises a fundamental question in advancing the modeling of environmental ecosystems: how to build a general framework for modeling the complex relationships amongst various environmental data over space and time? In this paper, we introduce a new framework, FREE, which maps available environmental data into a text space and then converts the traditional predictive modeling task in environmental science to the semantic recognition problem. The proposed FREE framework leverages recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) to supplement the original input features with natural language descriptions. This facilitates capturing the data semantics and also allows harnessing the irregularities of input features. When used for long-term prediction, FREE has the flexibility to incorporate newly collected observations to enhance future prediction. The efficacy of FREE is evaluated in the context of two societally important real-world applications, predicting stream water temperature in the Delaware River Basin and predicting annual corn yield in Illinois and Iowa. Beyond the superior predictive performance over multiple baseline methods, FREE is shown to be more data- and computation-efficient as it can be pre-trained on simulated data generated by physics-based models.