NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection: Methods and Results

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD) poses significant challenges to existing object detection and few-shot detection models when applied across domains. In conjunction with NTIRE 2025, we organized the 1st CD-FSOD Challenge, aiming to advance the performance of current object detectors on entirely novel target domains with only limited labeled data. The challenge attracted 152 registered participants, received submissions from 42 teams, and concluded with 13 teams making valid final submissions. Participants approached the task from diverse perspectives, proposing novel models that achieved new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results under both open-source and closed-source settings. In this report, we present an overview of the 1st NTIRE 2025 CD-FSOD Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and summarizing the results submitted by the participants.

Enhance Then Search: An Augmentation-Search Strategy with Foundation Models for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection

Foundation models pretrained on extensive datasets, such as GroundingDINO and LAE-DINO, have performed remarkably in the cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) task. Through rigorous few-shot training, we found that the integration of image-based data augmentation techniques and grid-based sub-domain search strategy significantly enhances the performance of these foundation models. Building upon GroundingDINO, we employed several widely used image augmentation methods and established optimization objectives to effectively navigate the expansive domain space in search of optimal sub-domains. This approach facilitates efficient few-shot object detection and introduces an approach to solving the CD-FSOD problem by efficiently searching for the optimal parameter configuration from the foundation model. Our findings substantially advance the practical deployment of vision-language models in data-scarce environments, offering critical insights into optimizing their cross-domain generalization capabilities without labor-intensive retraining. Code is available at https://github.com/jaychempan/ETS.

BeamVQ: Beam Search with Vector Quantization to Mitigate Data Scarcity in Physical Spatiotemporal Forecasting

In practice, physical spatiotemporal forecasting can suffer from data scarcity, because collecting large-scale data is non-trivial, especially for extreme events. Hence, we propose \method{}, a novel probabilistic framework to realize iterative self-training with new self-ensemble strategies, achieving better physical consistency and generalization on extreme events. Following any base forecasting model, we can encode its deterministic outputs into a latent space and retrieve multiple codebook entries to generate probabilistic outputs. Then BeamVQ extends the beam search from discrete spaces to the continuous state spaces in this field. We can further employ domain-specific metrics (e.g., Critical Success Index for extreme events) to filter out the top-k candidates and develop the new self-ensemble strategy by combining the high-quality candidates. The self-ensemble can not only improve the inference quality and robustness but also iteratively augment the training datasets during continuous self-training. Consequently, BeamVQ realizes the exploration of rare but critical phenomena beyond the original dataset. Comprehensive experiments on different benchmarks and backbones show that BeamVQ consistently reduces forecasting MSE (up to 39%), enhancing extreme events detection and proving its effectiveness in handling data scarcity.

Improved Forecasts of Global Extreme Marine Heatwaves Through a Physics-guided Data-driven Approach

The unusually warm sea surface temperature events known as marine heatwaves (MHWs) have a profound impact on marine ecosystems. Accurate prediction of extreme MHWs has significant scientific and financial worth. However, existing methods still have certain limitations, especially in the most extreme MHWs. In this study, to address these issues, based on the physical nature of MHWs, we created a novel deep learning neural network that is capable of accurate 10-day MHW forecasting. Our framework significantly improves the forecast ability of extreme MHWs through two specially designed modules inspired by numerical models: a coupler and a probabilistic data argumentation. The coupler simulates the driving effect of atmosphere on MHWs while the probabilistic data argumentation approaches significantly boost the forecast ability of extreme MHWs based on the idea of ensemble forecast. Compared with traditional numerical prediction, our framework has significantly higher accuracy and requires fewer computational resources. What's more, explainable AI methods show that wind forcing is the primary driver of MHW evolution and reveal its relation with air-sea heat exchange. Overall, our model provides a framework for understanding MHWs' driving processes and operational forecasts in the future.

ADAF: An Artificial Intelligence Data Assimilation Framework for Weather Forecasting

The forecasting skill of numerical weather prediction (NWP) models critically depends on the accurate initial conditions, also known as analysis, provided by data assimilation (DA). Traditional DA methods often face a trade-off between computational cost and accuracy due to complex linear algebra computations and the high dimensionality of the model, especially in nonlinear systems. Moreover, processing massive data in real-time requires substantial computational resources. To address this, we introduce an artificial intelligence-based data assimilation framework (ADAF) to generate high-quality kilometer-scale analysis. This study is the pioneering work using real-world observations from varied locations and multiple sources to verify the AI method's efficacy in DA, including sparse surface weather observations and satellite imagery. We implemented ADAF for four near-surface variables in the Contiguous United States (CONUS). The results indicate that ADAF surpasses the High Resolution Rapid Refresh Data Assimilation System (HRRRDAS) in accuracy by 16% to 33% for near-surface atmospheric conditions, aligning more closely with actual observations, and can effectively reconstruct extreme events, such as tropical cyclone wind fields. Sensitivity experiments reveal that ADAF can generate high-quality analysis even with low-accuracy backgrounds and extremely sparse surface observations. ADAF can assimilate massive observations within a three-hour window at low computational cost, taking about two seconds on an AMD MI200 graphics processing unit (GPU). ADAF has been shown to be efficient and effective in real-world DA, underscoring its potential role in operational weather forecasting.

Locate Anything on Earth: Advancing Open-Vocabulary Object Detection for Remote Sensing Community

Object detection, particularly open-vocabulary object detection, plays a crucial role in Earth sciences, such as environmental monitoring, natural disaster assessment, and land-use planning. However, existing open-vocabulary detectors, primarily trained on natural-world images, struggle to generalize to remote sensing images due to a significant data domain gap. Thus, this paper aims to advance the development of open-vocabulary object detection in remote sensing community. To achieve this, we first reformulate the task as Locate Anything on Earth (LAE) with the goal of detecting any novel concepts on Earth. We then developed the LAE-Label Engine which collects, auto-annotates, and unifies up to 10 remote sensing datasets creating the LAE-1M - the first large-scale remote sensing object detection dataset with broad category coverage. Using the LAE-1M, we further propose and train the novel LAE-DINO Model, the first open-vocabulary foundation object detector for the LAE task, featuring Dynamic Vocabulary Construction (DVC) and Visual-Guided Text Prompt Learning (VisGT) modules. DVC dynamically constructs vocabulary for each training batch, while VisGT maps visual features to semantic space, enhancing text features. We comprehensively conduct experiments on established remote sensing benchmark DIOR, DOTAv2.0, as well as our newly introduced 80-class LAE-80C benchmark. Results demonstrate the advantages of the LAE-1M dataset and the effectiveness of the LAE-DINO method.

BeamVQ: Aligning Space-Time Forecasting Model via Self-training on Physics-aware Metrics

Data-driven deep learning has emerged as the new paradigm to model complex physical space-time systems. These data-driven methods learn patterns by optimizing statistical metrics and tend to overlook the adherence to physical laws, unlike traditional model-driven numerical methods. Thus, they often generate predictions that are not physically realistic. On the other hand, by sampling a large amount of high quality predictions from a data-driven model, some predictions will be more physically plausible than the others and closer to what will happen in the future. Based on this observation, we propose \emph{Beam search by Vector Quantization} (BeamVQ) to enhance the physical alignment of data-driven space-time forecasting models. The key of BeamVQ is to train model on self-generated samples filtered with physics-aware metrics. To be flexibly support different backbone architectures, BeamVQ leverages a code bank to transform any encoder-decoder model to the continuous state space into discrete codes. Afterwards, it iteratively employs beam search to sample high-quality sequences, retains those with the highest physics-aware scores, and trains model on the new dataset. Comprehensive experiments show that BeamVQ not only gave an average statistical skill score boost for more than 32% for ten backbones on five datasets, but also significantly enhances physics-aware metrics.

MetaSD: A Unified Framework for Scalable Downscaling of Meteorological Variables in Diverse Situations

Addressing complex meteorological processes at a fine spatial resolution requires substantial computational resources. To accelerate meteorological simulations, researchers have utilized neural networks to downscale meteorological variables from low-resolution simulations. Despite notable advancements, contemporary cutting-edge downscaling algorithms tailored to specific variables. Addressing meteorological variables in isolation overlooks their interconnectedness, leading to an incomplete understanding of atmospheric dynamics. Additionally, the laborious processes of data collection, annotation, and computational resources required for individual variable downscaling are significant hurdles. Given the limited versatility of existing models across different meteorological variables and their failure to account for inter-variable relationships, this paper proposes a unified downscaling approach leveraging meta-learning. This framework aims to facilitate the downscaling of diverse meteorological variables derived from various numerical models and spatiotemporal scales. Trained at variables consisted of temperature, wind, surface pressure and total precipitation from ERA5 and GFS, the proposed method can be extended to downscale convective precipitation, potential energy, height, humidity and ozone from CFS, S2S and CMIP6 at different spatiotemporal scales, which demonstrating its capability to capture the interconnections among diverse variables. Our approach represents the initial effort to create a generalized downscaling model. Experimental evidence demonstrates that the proposed model outperforms existing top downscaling methods in both quantitative and qualitative assessments.

TeleChat Technical Report

In this technical report, we present TeleChat, a collection of large language models (LLMs) with parameters of 3 billion, 7 billion and 12 billion. It includes pretrained language models as well as fine-tuned chat models that is aligned with human preferences. TeleChat is initially pretrained on an extensive corpus containing a diverse collection of texts from both English and Chinese languages, including trillions of tokens. Subsequently, the model undergoes fine-tuning to align with human preferences, following a detailed methodology that we describe. We evaluate the performance of TeleChat on various tasks, including language understanding, mathematics, reasoning, code generation, and knowledge-based question answering. Our findings indicate that TeleChat achieves comparable performance to other open-source models of similar size across a wide range of public benchmarks. To support future research and applications utilizing LLMs, we release the fine-tuned model checkpoints of TeleChat's 7B and 12B variant, along with code and a portion of our pretraining data, to the public community.

AI-GOMS: Large AI-Driven Global Ocean Modeling System

Ocean modeling is a powerful tool for simulating the physical, chemical, and biological processes of the ocean, which is the foundation for marine science research and operational oceanography. Modern numerical ocean modeling mainly consists of governing equations and numerical algorithms. Nonlinear instability, computational expense, low reusability efficiency and high coupling costs have gradually become the main bottlenecks for the further development of numerical ocean modeling. Recently, artificial intelligence-based modeling in scientific computing has shown revolutionary potential for digital twins and scientific simulations, but the bottlenecks of numerical ocean modeling have not been further solved. Here, we present AI-GOMS, a large AI-driven global ocean modeling system, for accurate and efficient global ocean daily prediction. AI-GOMS consists of a backbone model with the Fourier-based Masked Autoencoder structure for basic ocean variable prediction and lightweight fine-tuning models incorporating regional downscaling, wave decoding, and biochemistry coupling modules. AI-GOMS has achieved the best performance in 30 days of prediction for the global ocean basic variables with 15 depth layers at 1/4{\deg} spatial resolution. Beyond the good performance in statistical metrics, AI-GOMS realizes the simulation of mesoscale eddies in the Kuroshio region at 1/12{\deg} spatial resolution and ocean stratification in the tropical Pacific Ocean. AI-GOMS provides a new backbone-downstream paradigm for Earth system modeling, which makes the system transferable, scalable and reusable.