Chieh-Yu Chen

Morteza Mardani, Noah Brenowitz, Yair Cohen et al. · nvidia

The state of the art for physical hazard prediction from weather and climate requires expensive km-scale numerical simulations driven by coarser resolution global inputs. Here, a generative diffusion architecture is explored for downscaling such global inputs to km-scale, as a cost-effective machine learning alternative. The model is trained to predict 2km data from a regional weather model over Taiwan, conditioned on a 25km global reanalysis. To address the large resolution ratio, different physics involved at different scales and prediction of channels beyond those in the input data, we employ a two-step approach where a UNet predicts the mean and a corrector diffusion (CorrDiff) model predicts the residual. CorrDiff exhibits encouraging skill in bulk MAE and CRPS scores. The predicted spectra and distributions from CorrDiff faithfully recover important power law relationships in the target data. Case studies of coherent weather phenomena show that CorrDiff can help sharpen wind and temperature gradients that co-locate with intense rainfall in cold front, and can help intensify typhoons and synthesize rain band structures. Calibration of model uncertainty remains challenging. The prospect of unifying methods like CorrDiff with coarser resolution global weather models implies a potential for global-to-regional multi-scale machine learning simulation.

Hsin-Ying Hsieh, Chieh-Yu Chen, Yu-Shuen Wang et al.

We present a data-driven basketball set play simulation. Given an offensive set play sketch, our method simulates potential scenarios that may occur in the game. The simulation provides coaches and players with insights on how a given set play can be executed. To achieve the goal, we train a conditional adversarial network on NBA movement data to imitate the behaviors of how players move around the court through two major components: a generator that learns to generate natural player movements based on a latent noise and a user sketched set play; and a discriminator that is used to evaluate the realism of the basketball play. To improve the quality of simulation, we minimize 1.) a dribbler loss to prevent the ball from drifting away from the dribbler; 2.) a defender loss to prevent the dribbler from not being defended; 3.) a ball passing loss to ensure the straightness of passing trajectories; and 4) an acceleration loss to minimize unnecessary players' movements. To evaluate our system, we objectively compared real and simulated basketball set plays. Besides, a subjective test was conducted to judge whether a set play was real or generated by our network. On average, the mean correct rates to the binary tests were 56.17 \%. Experiment results and the evaluations demonstrated the effectiveness of our system.