Deep Clustering for Climate: Analyzing Teleconnections through Learned Categorical States

Understanding and representing complex climate variability is essential for both scientific analysis and predictive modeling. However, identifying meaningful climate regimes from raw variables is challenging, as they exhibit high noise and nonlinear dependencies. In this work, we explore the use of Masked Siamese Networks to discretize climate time series into semantically rich clusters. Focusing on daily minimum and maximum temperature, we show that the resulting representations: (i) yield clusters that reflect meaningful climate states under our modeling assumptions, offering a simplified representation for downstream use; (ii) enable sampling and analysis of specific climate scenarios; and (iii) exhibit statistical associations with El Niño events, underscoring their scientific relevance. Our findings highlight the potential of self-supervised discretization as a tool for climate data analysis and open avenues for incorporating richer climate indicators in future work.

Global Offshore Wind Infrastructure: Deployment and Operational Dynamics from Dense Sentinel-1 Time Series

The offshore wind energy sector is expanding rapidly, increasing the need for independent, high-temporal-resolution monitoring of infrastructure deployment and operation at global scale. While Earth Observation based offshore wind infrastructure mapping has matured for spatial localization, existing open datasets lack temporally dense and semantically fine-grained information on construction and operational dynamics. We introduce a global Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) time series data corpus that resolves deployment and operational phases of offshore wind infrastructure from 2016Q1 to 2025Q1. Building on an updated object detection workflow, we compile 15,606 time series at detected infrastructure locations, with overall 14,840,637 events as analysis-ready 1D SAR backscatter profiles, one profile per Sentinel-1 acquisition and location. To enable direct use and benchmarking, we release (i) the analysis ready 1D SAR profiles, (ii) event-level baseline semantic labels generated by a rule-based classifier, and (iii) an expert-annotated benchmark dataset of 553 time series with 328,657 event labels. The baseline classifier achieves a macro F1 score of 0.84 in event-wise evaluation and an area under the collapsed edit similarity-quality threshold curve (AUC) of 0.785, indicating temporal coherence. We demonstrate that the resulting corpus supports global-scale analyses of deployment dynamics, the identification of differences in regional deployment patterns, vessel interactions, and operational events, and provides a reference for developing and comparing time series classification methods for offshore wind infrastructure monitoring.

QARIMA: A Quantum Approach To Classical Time Series Analysis

We present a quantum-inspired ARIMA methodology that integrates quantum-assisted lag discovery with \emph{fixed-configuration} variational quantum circuits (VQCs) for parameter estimation and weak-lag refinement. Differencing and candidate lags are identified via swap-test-driven quantum autocorrelation (QACF) and quantum partial autocorrelation (QPACF), with a delayed-matrix construction that aligns quantum projections to time-domain regressors, followed by standard information-criterion parsimony. Given the screened orders $(p,d,q)$, we retain a fixed VQC ansatz, optimizer, and training budget, preventing hyperparameter leakage, and deploy the circuit in two estimation roles: VQC-AR for autoregressive coefficients and VQC-MA for moving-average coefficients. Between screening and estimation, a lightweight VQC weak-lag refinement re-weights or prunes screened AR lags without altering $(p,d,q)$. Across environmental and industrial datasets, we perform rolling-origin evaluations against automated classical ARIMA, reporting out-of-sample mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and Diebold--Mariano tests on MSE and MAE. Empirically, the seven quantum contributions -- (1) differencing selection, (2) QACF, (3) QPACF, (4) swap-test primitives with delayed-matrix construction, (5) VQC-AR, (6) VQC weak-lag refinement, and (7) VQC-MA -- collectively reduce meta-optimization overhead and make explicit where quantum effects enter order discovery, lag refinement, and AR/MA parameter estimation.

From Noisy Historical Maps to Time-Series Oil Palm Mapping Without Annotation in Malaysia and Indonesia (2020-2024)

Accurate monitoring of oil palm plantations is critical for balancing economic development with environmental conservation in Southeast Asia. However, existing plantation maps often suffer from low spatial resolution and a lack of recent temporal coverage, impeding effective surveillance of rapid land-use changes. In this study, we propose a deep learning framework to generate 10-meter resolution oil palm plantation maps for Indonesia and Malaysia from 2020 to 2024, utilizing Sentinel-2 imagery without requiring new manual annotations. To address the resolution mismatch between coarse 100-meter historical labels and 10-meter imagery, we employ a U-Net architecture optimized with Determinant-based Mutual Information (DMI). This approach effectively mitigates the influence of label noise. We validated our method against 2,058 manually verified points, achieving overall accuracies of 70.64%, 63.53%, and 60.06% for the years 2020, 2022, and 2024, respectively. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that oil palm coverage in the region peaked in 2022 before experiencing a decline in 2024. Furthermore, land cover transition analysis highlights a concerning trajectory of plantation expansion into flooded vegetation areas, despite a general stabilization in rotations with other crop types. These high-resolution maps provide essential data for monitoring sustainability commitments and deforestation dynamics in the region, and the generated datasets are made publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17768444.

Fixed-Reservoir vs Variational Quantum Architectures for Chaotic Dynamics: Benchmarking QRC and QPINN on the Lorenz System

Deploying quantum machine learning on NISQ devices requires architectures where training overhead does not negate computational advantages. We systematically compare two quantum approaches for chaotic time-series prediction on the Lorenz system: a variational Quantum Physics-Informed Neural Network (QPINN) and a Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) framework utilizing a fixed transverse-field Ising Hamiltonian. Under matched resources ($4$--$5$ qubits, $2$--$3$ layers), QRC achieves an $81\%$ lower mean-squared error (test MSE $3.2 \pm 0.6$ vs. $47.9 \pm 36.6$ for QPINN) while training $\sim 52,000\times$ faster ($0.2$\,s vs. $\sim 2.4$\,h per seed). Drawing on the classical delay-embedding principle, we formalize a temporal windowing technique within the QRC pipeline that improves attractor reconstruction by providing bounded, structured input history. Analysis reveals that QPINN instability stems from capacity limitations and competing loss terms rather than barren plateaus; gradient norms remained large ($10^3$--$10^4$), ruling out exponential suppression at this scale. These failure modes are absent by construction in the non-variational QRC approach. We validate robustness across three canonical systems (Lorenz, Rössler, and Lorenz-96), where QRC consistently achieves low test MSE ($3.1 \pm 0.6$, $1.8 \pm 0.1$, and $12.4 \pm 0.6$, respectively) with sub-second training. Our findings suggest the fixed-reservoir architecture is a primary driver of QRC's advantage at these scales, warranting further investigation at larger qubit counts and on hardware where quantum-specific advantages are expected to emerge.

Time-Series Classification with Multivariate Statistical Dependence Features

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for non-stationary time-series analysis that replaces conventional correlation-based statistics with direct estimation of statistical dependence in the normalized joint density of input and target signals, the cross density ratio (CDR). Unlike windowed correlation estimates, this measure is independent of sample order and robust to regime changes. The method builds on the functional maximal correlation algorithm (FMCA), which constructs a projection space by decomposing the eigenspectrum of the CDR. Multiscale features from this eigenspace are classified using a lightweight single-hidden-layer perceptron. On the TI-46 digit speech corpus, our approach outperforms hidden Markov models (HMMs) and state-of-the-art spiking neural networks, achieving higher accuracy with fewer than 10 layers and a storage footprint under 5 MB.

DM-ASR: Diarization-aware Multi-speaker ASR with Large Language Models

Multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR) aims to transcribe conversational speech involving multiple speakers, requiring the model to capture not only what was said, but also who said it and sometimes when it was spoken. Recent Speech-LLM approaches have shown the potential of unified modeling for this task, but jointly learning speaker attribution, temporal structure, and lexical recognition remains difficult and data-intensive. At the current stage, leveraging reliable speaker diarization as an explicit structural prior provides a practical and efficient way to simplify this task. To effectively exploit such priors, we propose DM-ASR, a diarization-aware multi-speaker ASR framework that reformulates the task as a multi-turn dialogue generation process. Given an audio chunk and diarization results, DM-ASR decomposes transcription into a sequence of speaker- and time-conditioned queries, each corresponding to one speaker in one time segment. This formulation converts multi-speaker recognition into a series of structured sub-tasks, explicitly decoupling speaker-temporal structure from linguistic content and enabling effective integration of diarization cues with the reasoning capability of large language models. We further introduce an optional word-level timestamp prediction mechanism that interleaves word and timestamp tokens, yielding richer structured outputs and better transcription quality. Our analysis shows that diarization systems provide more reliable speaker identities and segment-level boundaries, while LLMs excel at modeling linguistic content and long-range dependencies, demonstrating their complementary strengths. Experiments on Mandarin and English benchmarks show that the proposed approach achieves strong performance with relatively small models and training data, while remaining competitive with or outperforming existing unified approaches.

FETS Benchmark: Foundation Models Outperform Dataset-specific Machine Learning in Energy Time Series Forecasting

Driven by the transition towards a climate-neutral energy system, accurate energy time series forecasting is critical for planning and operation. Yet, it remains largely a dataset-specific task, requiring comprehensive training data, limiting scalability, and resulting in high model development and maintenance effort. Recently, foundation models that aim to learn generalizable patterns via extensive pretraining have shown superior performance in multiple prediction tasks. Despite their success and strong potential to address challenges in energy forecasting, their application in this domain remains largely unexplored. We address this gap by presenting the Foundation Models in Energy Time Series Forecasting (FETS) benchmark. We (1) provide a structured overview of energy forecasting use cases along three main dimensions: stakeholders, attributes, and data categories; (2) collect and analyze 54 datasets across 9 data categories, guided by typical stakeholder interests; (3) benchmark foundation models against classical machine learning approaches across different forecasting settings. Foundation models consistently outperform dataset-specific optimized machine learning approaches across all settings and data categories, despite the latter having seen the full historic target data during training. In particular, covariate-informed foundation models achieve the strongest performance. Further analysis reveals a strong correlation between predictive performance and spectral entropy, performance saturation beyond a certain context length, and improved performance at higher aggregation levels such as national load, district heating, and power grid data. Overall, our findings highlight the strong potential of foundation models as scalable and generalizable forecasting solutions for the energy domain, particularly in data-constrained and privacy-sensitive settings.

A unified data format for managing diabetes time-series data: DIAbetes eXchange (DIAX)

Diabetes devices, including Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM), Smart Insulin Pens, and Automated Insulin Delivery systems, generate rich time-series data widely used in research and machine learning. However, inconsistent data formats across sources hinder sharing, integration, and analysis. We present DIAX (DIAbetes eXchange), a standardized JSON-based format for unifying diabetes time-series data, including CGM, insulin, and meal signals. DIAX promotes interoperability, reproducibility, and extensibility, particularly for machine learning applications. An open-source repository provides tools for dataset conversion, cross-format compatibility, visualization, and community contributions. DIAX is a translational resource, not a data host, ensuring flexibility without imposing data-sharing constraints. Currently, DIAX is compatible with other standardization efforts and supports major datasets (DCLP3, DCLP5, IOBP2, PEDAP, T1Dexi, Loop), totaling over 10 million patient-hours of data. https://github.com/Center-for-Diabetes-Technology/DIAX

Trustworthy deep domain adaptation for wearable photoplethysmography signal analysis with decision-theoretic uncertainty quantification

In principle, deep generative models can be used to perform domain adaptation; i.e. align the input feature representations of test data with that of a separate discriminative model's training data. This can help improve the discriminative model's performance on the test data. However, generative models are prone to producing hallucinations and artefacts that may degrade the quality of generated data, and therefore, predictive performance when processed by the discriminative model. While uncertainty quantification can provide a means to assess the quality of adapted data, the standard framework for evaluating the quality of predicted uncertainties may not easily extend to generative models due to the common lack of ground truths (among other reasons). Even with ground truths, this evaluation is agnostic to how the generated outputs are used on the downstream task, limiting the extent to which the uncertainty reliability analysis provides insights about the utility of the uncertainties with respect to the intended use case of the adapted examples. Here, we describe how decision-theoretic uncertainty quantification can address these concerns and provide a convenient framework for evaluating the trustworthiness of generated outputs, in particular, for domain adaptation. We consider a case study in photoplethysmography time series denoising for Atrial Fibrillation classification. This formalises a well-known heuristic method of using a downstream classifier to assess the quality of generated outputs.