LightWeather: Harnessing Absolute Positional Encoding to Efficient and Scalable Global Weather Forecasting

Recently, Transformers have gained traction in weather forecasting for their capability to capture long-term spatial-temporal correlations. However, their complex architectures result in large parameter counts and extended training times, limiting their practical application and scalability to global-scale forecasting. This paper aims to explore the key factor for accurate weather forecasting and design more efficient solutions. Interestingly, our empirical findings reveal that absolute positional encoding is what really works in Transformer-based weather forecasting models, which can explicitly model the spatial-temporal correlations even without attention mechanisms. We theoretically prove that its effectiveness stems from the integration of geographical coordinates and real-world time features, which are intrinsically related to the dynamics of weather. Based on this, we propose LightWeather, a lightweight and effective model for station-based global weather forecasting. We employ absolute positional encoding and a simple MLP in place of other components of Transformer. With under 30k parameters and less than one hour of training time, LightWeather achieves state-of-the-art performance on global weather datasets compared to other advanced DL methods. The results underscore the superiority of integrating spatial-temporal knowledge over complex architectures, providing novel insights for DL in weather forecasting.

HDR Imaging for Dynamic Scenes with Events

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI) for real-world dynamic scenes is challenging because moving objects may lead to hybrid degradation of low dynamic range and motion blur. Existing event-based approaches only focus on a separate task, while cascading HDRI and motion deblurring would lead to sub-optimal solutions, and unavailable ground-truth sharp HDR images aggravate the predicament. To address these challenges, we propose an Event-based HDRI framework within a Self-supervised learning paradigm, i.e., Self-EHDRI, which generalizes HDRI performance in real-world dynamic scenarios. Specifically, a self-supervised learning strategy is carried out by learning cross-domain conversions from blurry LDR images to sharp LDR images, which enables sharp HDR images to be accessible in the intermediate process even though ground-truth sharp HDR images are missing. Then, we formulate the event-based HDRI and motion deblurring model and conduct a unified network to recover the intermediate sharp HDR results, where both the high dynamic range and high temporal resolution of events are leveraged simultaneously for compensation. We construct large-scale synthetic and real-world datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed Self-EHDRI outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin. The codes, datasets, and results are available at https://lxp-whu.github.io/Self-EHDRI.

SHIFT3D: Synthesizing Hard Inputs For Tricking 3D Detectors

We present SHIFT3D, a differentiable pipeline for generating 3D shapes that are structurally plausible yet challenging to 3D object detectors. In safety-critical applications like autonomous driving, discovering such novel challenging objects can offer insight into unknown vulnerabilities of 3D detectors. By representing objects with a signed distanced function (SDF), we show that gradient error signals allow us to smoothly deform the shape or pose of a 3D object in order to confuse a downstream 3D detector. Importantly, the objects generated by SHIFT3D physically differ from the baseline object yet retain a semantically recognizable shape. Our approach provides interpretable failure modes for modern 3D object detectors, and can aid in preemptive discovery of potential safety risks within 3D perception systems before these risks become critical failures.

Structural Inference of Networked Dynamical Systems with Universal Differential Equations

Networked dynamical systems are common throughout science in engineering; e.g., biological networks, reaction networks, power systems, and the like. For many such systems, nonlinearity drives populations of identical (or near-identical) units to exhibit a wide range of nontrivial behaviors, such as the emergence of coherent structures (e.g., waves and patterns) or otherwise notable dynamics (e.g., synchrony and chaos). In this work, we seek to infer (i) the intrinsic physics of a base unit of a population, (ii) the underlying graphical structure shared between units, and (iii) the coupling physics of a given networked dynamical system given observations of nodal states. These tasks are formulated around the notion of the Universal Differential Equation, whereby unknown dynamical systems can be approximated with neural networks, mathematical terms known a priori (albeit with unknown parameterizations), or combinations of the two. We demonstrate the value of these inference tasks by investigating not only future state predictions but also the inference of system behavior on varied network topologies. The effectiveness and utility of these methods is shown with their application to canonical networked nonlinear coupled oscillators.

HyperPrompt: Prompt-based Task-Conditioning of Transformers

Prompt-Tuning is a new paradigm for finetuning pre-trained language models in a parameter-efficient way. Here, we explore the use of HyperNetworks to generate hyper-prompts: we propose HyperPrompt, a novel architecture for prompt-based task-conditioning of self-attention in Transformers. The hyper-prompts are end-to-end learnable via generation by a HyperNetwork. HyperPrompt allows the network to learn task-specific feature maps where the hyper-prompts serve as task global memories for the queries to attend to, at the same time enabling flexible information sharing among tasks. We show that HyperPrompt is competitive against strong multi-task learning baselines with as few as $0.14\%$ of additional task-conditioning parameters, achieving great parameter and computational efficiency. Through extensive empirical experiments, we demonstrate that HyperPrompt can achieve superior performances over strong T5 multi-task learning baselines and parameter-efficient adapter variants including Prompt-Tuning and HyperFormer++ on Natural Language Understanding benchmarks of GLUE and SuperGLUE across many model sizes.

GradTail: Learning Long-Tailed Data Using Gradient-based Sample Weighting

We propose GradTail, an algorithm that uses gradients to improve model performance on the fly in the face of long-tailed training data distributions. Unlike conventional long-tail classifiers which operate on converged - and possibly overfit - models, we demonstrate that an approach based on gradient dot product agreement can isolate long-tailed data early on during model training and improve performance by dynamically picking higher sample weights for that data. We show that such upweighting leads to model improvements for both classification and regression models, the latter of which are relatively unexplored in the long-tail literature, and that the long-tail examples found by gradient alignment are consistent with our semantic expectations.

Just Pick a Sign: Optimizing Deep Multitask Models with Gradient Sign Dropout

The vast majority of deep models use multiple gradient signals, typically corresponding to a sum of multiple loss terms, to update a shared set of trainable weights. However, these multiple updates can impede optimal training by pulling the model in conflicting directions. We present Gradient Sign Dropout (GradDrop), a probabilistic masking procedure which samples gradients at an activation layer based on their level of consistency. GradDrop is implemented as a simple deep layer that can be used in any deep net and synergizes with other gradient balancing approaches. We show that GradDrop outperforms the state-of-the-art multiloss methods within traditional multitask and transfer learning settings, and we discuss how GradDrop reveals links between optimal multiloss training and gradient stochasticity.

Sparse representation for damage identification of structural systems

Identifying damage of structural systems is typically characterized as an inverse problem which might be ill-conditioned due to aleatory and epistemic uncertainties induced by measurement noise and modeling error. Sparse representation can be used to perform inverse analysis for the case of sparse damage. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage sensitivity analysis-based framework for both model updating and sparse damage identification. Specifically, an $\ell_2$ Bayesian learning method is firstly developed for updating the intact model and uncertainty quantification so as to set forward a baseline for damage detection. A sparse representation pipeline built on a quasi-$\ell_0$ method, e.g., Sequential Threshold Least Squares (STLS) regression, is then presented for damage localization and quantification. Additionally, Bayesian optimization together with cross validation is developed to heuristically learn hyperparameters from data, which saves the computational cost of hyperparameter tuning and produces more reliable identification result. The proposed framework is verified by three examples, including a 10-story shear-type building, a complex truss structure, and a shake table test of an eight-story steel frame. Results show that the proposed approach is capable of both localizing and quantifying structural damage with high accuracy.

Taskology: Utilizing Task Relations at Scale

It has been recognized that the joint training of computer vision tasks with shared network components enables higher performance for each individual task. Training tasks together allows learning the inherent relationships among them; however, this requires large sets of labeled data. Instead, we argue that utilizing the known relationships between tasks explicitly allows improving their performance with less labeled data. To this end, we aim to establish and explore a novel approach for the collective training of computer vision tasks. In particular, we focus on utilizing the inherent relations of tasks by employing consistency constraints derived from physics, geometry, and logic. We show that collections of models can be trained without shared components, interacting only through the consistency constraints as supervision (peer-supervision). The consistency constraints enforce the structural priors between tasks, which enables their mutually consistent training, and -- in turn -- leads to overall higher performance. Treating individual tasks as modules, agnostic to their implementation, reduces the engineering overhead to collectively train many tasks to a minimum. Furthermore, the collective training can be distributed among multiple compute nodes, which further facilitates training at scale. We demonstrate our framework on subsets of the following collection of tasks: depth and normal prediction, semantic segmentation, 3D motion estimation, and object tracking and detection in point clouds.

Deep learning of physical laws from scarce data

Harnessing data to discover the underlying governing laws or equations that describe the behavior of complex physical systems can significantly advance our modeling, simulation and understanding of such systems in various science and engineering disciplines. Recent advances in sparse identification show encouraging success in distilling closed-form governing equations from data for a wide range of nonlinear dynamical systems. However, the fundamental bottleneck of this approach lies in the robustness and scalability with respect to data scarcity and noise. This work introduces a novel physics-informed deep learning framework to discover governing partial differential equations (PDEs) from scarce and noisy data for nonlinear spatiotemporal systems. In particular, this approach seamlessly integrates the strengths of deep neural networks for rich representation learning, automatic differentiation and sparse regression to approximate the solution of system variables, compute essential derivatives, as well as identify the key derivative terms and parameters that form the structure and explicit expression of the PDEs. The efficacy and robustness of this method are demonstrated on discovering a variety of PDE systems with different levels of data scarcity and noise. The resulting computational framework shows the potential for closed-form model discovery in practical applications where large and accurate datasets are intractable to capture.