Precipitation nowcasting of satellite data using physically conditioned neural networks

Accurate short-term precipitation forecasts predominantly rely on dense weather-radar networks, limiting operational value in places most exposed to climate extremes. We present TUPANN (Transferable and Universal Physics-Aligned Nowcasting Network), a satellite-only model trained on GOES-16 RRQPE. Unlike most deep learning models for nowcasting, TUPANN decomposes the forecast into physically meaningful components: a variational encoder-decoder infers motion and intensity fields from recent imagery under optical-flow supervision, a lead-time-conditioned MaxViT evolves the latent state, and a differentiable advection operator reconstructs future frames. We evaluate TUPANN on both GOES-16 and IMERG data, in up to four distinct climates (Rio de Janeiro, Manaus, Miami, La Paz) at 10-180min lead times using the CSI and HSS metrics over 4-64 mm/h thresholds. Comparisons against optical-flow, deep learning and hybrid baselines show that TUPANN achieves the best or second-best skill in most settings, with pronounced gains at higher thresholds. Training on multiple cities further improves performance, while cross-city experiments show modest degradation and occasional gains for rare heavy-rain regimes. The model produces smooth, interpretable motion fields aligned with numerical optical flow and runs in near real time due to the low latency of GOES-16. These results indicate that physically aligned learning can provide nowcasts that are skillful, transferable and global.

DORAEMON: A Unified Library for Visual Object Modeling and Representation Learning at Scale

DORAEMON is an open-source PyTorch library that unifies visual object modeling and representation learning across diverse scales. A single YAML-driven workflow covers classification, retrieval and metric learning; more than 1000 pretrained backbones are exposed through a timm-compatible interface, together with modular losses, augmentations and distributed-training utilities. Reproducible recipes match or exceed reference results on ImageNet-1K, MS-Celeb-1M and Stanford online products, while one-command export to ONNX or HuggingFace bridges research and deployment. By consolidating datasets, models, and training techniques into one platform, DORAEMON offers a scalable foundation for rapid experimentation in visual recognition and representation learning, enabling efficient transfer of research advances to real-world applications. The repository is available at https://github.com/wuji3/DORAEMON.

Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Neural Operators for Parametric PDEs: A Human-AI Collaborative Analysis

PDEs arise ubiquitously in science and engineering, where solutions depend on parameters (physical properties, boundary conditions, geometry). Traditional numerical methods require re-solving the PDE for each parameter, making parameter space exploration prohibitively expensive. Recent machine learning advances, particularly physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and neural operators, have revolutionized parametric PDE solving by learning solution operators that generalize across parameter spaces. We critically analyze two main paradigms: (1) PINNs, which embed physical laws as soft constraints and excel at inverse problems with sparse data, and (2) neural operators (e.g., DeepONet, Fourier Neural Operator), which learn mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces and achieve unprecedented generalization. Through comparisons across fluid dynamics, solid mechanics, heat transfer, and electromagnetics, we show neural operators can achieve computational speedups of $10^3$ to $10^5$ times faster than traditional solvers for multi-query scenarios, while maintaining comparable accuracy. We provide practical guidance for method selection, discuss theoretical foundations (universal approximation, convergence), and identify critical open challenges: high-dimensional parameters, complex geometries, and out-of-distribution generalization. This work establishes a unified framework for understanding parametric PDE solvers via operator learning, offering a comprehensive, incrementally updated resource for this rapidly evolving field

A Theoretical Framework for Environmental Similarity and Vessel Mobility as Coupled Predictors of Marine Invasive Species Pathways

Marine invasive species spread through global shipping and generate substantial ecological and economic impacts. Traditional risk assessments require detailed records of ballast water and traffic patterns, which are often incomplete, limiting global coverage. This work advances a theoretical framework that quantifies invasion risk by combining environmental similarity across ports with observed and forecasted maritime mobility. Climate-based feature representations characterize each port's marine conditions, while mobility networks derived from Automatic Identification System data capture vessel flows and potential transfer pathways. Clustering and metric learning reveal climate analogues and enable the estimation of species survival likelihood along shipping routes. A temporal link prediction model captures how traffic patterns may change under shifting environmental conditions. The resulting fusion of environmental similarity and predicted mobility provides exposure estimates at the port and voyage levels, supporting targeted monitoring, routing adjustments, and management interventions.

Data Efficiency and Transfer Robustness in Biomedical Image Segmentation: A Study of Redundancy and Forgetting with Cellpose

Generalist biomedical image segmentation models such as Cellpose are increasingly applied across diverse imaging modalities and cell types. However, two critical challenges remain underexplored: (1) the extent of training data redundancy and (2) the impact of cross domain transfer on model retention. In this study, we conduct a systematic empirical analysis of these challenges using Cellpose as a case study. First, to assess data redundancy, we propose a simple dataset quantization (DQ) strategy for constructing compact yet diverse training subsets. Experiments on the Cyto dataset show that image segmentation performance saturates with only 10% of the data, revealing substantial redundancy and potential for training with minimal annotations. Latent space analysis using MAE embeddings and t-SNE confirms that DQ selected patches capture greater feature diversity than random sampling. Second, to examine catastrophic forgetting, we perform cross domain finetuning experiments and observe significant degradation in source domain performance, particularly when adapting from generalist to specialist domains. We demonstrate that selective DQ based replay reintroducing just 5-10% of the source data effectively restores source performance, while full replay can hinder target adaptation. Additionally, we find that training domain sequencing improves generalization and reduces forgetting in multi stage transfer. Our findings highlight the importance of data centric design in biomedical image segmentation and suggest that efficient training requires not only compact subsets but also retention aware learning strategies and informed domain ordering. The code is available at https://github.com/MMV-Lab/biomedseg-efficiency.

ForeRobo: Unlocking Infinite Simulation Data for 3D Goal-driven Robotic Manipulation

Efficiently leveraging simulation to acquire advanced manipulation skills is both challenging and highly significant. We introduce \textit{ForeRobo}, a generative robotic agent that utilizes generative simulations to autonomously acquire manipulation skills driven by envisioned goal states. Instead of directly learning low-level policies, we advocate integrating generative paradigms with classical control. Our approach equips a robotic agent with a self-guided \textit{propose-generate-learn-actuate} cycle. The agent first proposes the skills to be acquired and constructs the corresponding simulation environments; it then configures objects into appropriate arrangements to generate skill-consistent goal states (\textit{ForeGen}). Subsequently, the virtually infinite data produced by ForeGen are used to train the proposed state generation model (\textit{ForeFormer}), which establishes point-wise correspondences by predicting the 3D goal position of every point in the current state, based on the scene state and task instructions. Finally, classical control algorithms are employed to drive the robot in real-world environments to execute actions based on the envisioned goal states. Compared with end-to-end policy learning methods, ForeFormer offers superior interpretability and execution efficiency. We train and benchmark ForeFormer across a variety of rigid-body and articulated-object manipulation tasks, and observe an average improvement of 56.32\% over the state-of-the-art state generation models, demonstrating strong generality across different manipulation patterns. Moreover, in real-world evaluations involving more than 20 robotic tasks, ForeRobo achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and exhibits remarkable generalization capabilities, attaining an average success rate of 79.28\%.

Active transfer learning for structural health monitoring

Data for training structural health monitoring (SHM) systems are often expensive and/or impractical to obtain, particularly for labelled data. Population-based SHM (PBSHM) aims to address this limitation by leveraging data from multiple structures. However, data from different structures will follow distinct distributions, potentially leading to large generalisation errors for models learnt via conventional machine learning methods. To address this issue, transfer learning -- in the form of domain adaptation (DA) -- can be used to align the data distributions. Most previous approaches have only considered \emph{unsupervised} DA, where no labelled target data are available; they do not consider how to incorporate these technologies in an online framework -- updating as labels are obtained throughout the monitoring campaign. This paper proposes a Bayesian framework for DA in PBSHM, that can improve unsupervised DA mappings using a limited quantity of labelled target data. In addition, this model is integrated into an active sampling strategy to guide inspections to select the most informative observations to label -- leading to further reductions in the required labelled data to learn a target classifier. The effectiveness of this methodology is evaluated on a population of experimental bridges. Specifically, this population includes data corresponding to several damage states, as well as, a comprehensive set of environmental conditions. It is found that combining transfer learning and active learning can improve data efficiency when learning classification models in label-scarce scenarios. This result has implications for data-informed operation and maintenance of structures, suggesting a reduction in inspections over the operational lifetime of a structure -- and therefore a reduction in operational costs -- can be achieved.

Soft Task-Aware Routing of Experts for Equivariant Representation Learning

Equivariant representation learning aims to capture variations induced by input transformations in the representation space, whereas invariant representation learning encodes semantic information by disregarding such transformations. Recent studies have shown that jointly learning both types of representations is often beneficial for downstream tasks, typically by employing separate projection heads. However, this design overlooks information shared between invariant and equivariant learning, which leads to redundant feature learning and inefficient use of model capacity. To address this, we introduce Soft Task-Aware Routing (STAR), a routing strategy for projection heads that models them as experts. STAR induces the experts to specialize in capturing either shared or task-specific information, thereby reducing redundant feature learning. We validate this effect by observing lower canonical correlations between invariant and equivariant embeddings. Experimental results show consistent improvements across diverse transfer learning tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/YonseiML/star.

A Three-Stage Bayesian Transfer Learning Framework to Improve Predictions in Data-Scarce Domains

The use of ML in engineering has grown steadily to support a wide array of applications. Among these methods, deep neural networks have been widely adopted due to their performance and accessibility, but they require large, high-quality datasets. Experimental data are often sparse, noisy, or insufficient to build resilient data-driven models. Transfer learning, which leverages relevant data-abundant source domains to assist learning in data-scarce target domains, has shown efficacy. Parameter transfer, where pretrained weights are reused, is common but degrades under large domain shifts. Domain-adversarial neural networks (DANNs) help address this issue by learning domain-invariant representations, thereby improving transfer under greater domain shifts in a semi-supervised setting. However, DANNs can be unstable during training and lack a native means for uncertainty quantification. This study introduces a fully-supervised three-stage framework, the staged Bayesian domain-adversarial neural network (staged B-DANN), that combines parameter transfer and shared latent space adaptation. In Stage 1, a deterministic feature extractor is trained on the source domain. This feature extractor is then adversarially refined using a DANN in Stage 2. In Stage 3, a Bayesian neural network is built on the adapted feature extractor for fine-tuning on the target domain to handle conditional shifts and yield calibrated uncertainty estimates. This staged B-DANN approach was first validated on a synthetic benchmark, where it was shown to significantly outperform standard transfer techniques. It was then applied to the task of predicting critical heat flux in rectangular channels, leveraging data from tube experiments as the source domain. The results of this study show that the staged B-DANN method can improve predictive accuracy and generalization, potentially assisting other domains in nuclear engineering.

Analysis of the Robustness of an Edge Detector Based on Cellular Automata Optimized by Particle Swarm

The edge detection task is essential in image processing aiming to extract relevant information from an image. One recurring problem in this task is the weaknesses found in some detectors, such as the difficulty in detecting loose edges and the lack of context to extract relevant information from specific problems. To address these weaknesses and adapt the detector to the properties of an image, an adaptable detector described by two-dimensional cellular automaton and optimized by meta-heuristic combined with transfer learning techniques was developed. This study aims to analyze the impact of expanding the search space of the optimization phase and the robustness of the adaptability of the detector in identifying edges of a set of natural images and specialized subsets extracted from the same image set. The results obtained prove that expanding the search space of the optimization phase was not effective for the chosen image set. The study also analyzed the adaptability of the model through a series of experiments and validation techniques and found that, regardless of the validation, the model was able to adapt to the input and the transfer learning techniques applied to the model showed no significant improvements.