Chao-Sheng Tang

Hao Zhang, Jin-Jian Xu, Hong-Wei Cui et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced Earth sciences, yet its full potential in to comprehensively modeling Earth's complex dynamics remains unrealized. Geoscience foundation models (GFMs) emerge as a paradigm-shifting solution, integrating extensive cross-disciplinary data to enhance the simulation and understanding of Earth system dynamics. These data-centric AI models extract insights from petabytes of structured and unstructured data, effectively addressing the complexities of Earth systems that traditional models struggle to capture. The unique strengths of GFMs include flexible task specification, diverse input-output capabilities, and multi-modal knowledge representation, enabling analyses that surpass those of individual data sources or traditional AI methods. This review not only highlights the key advantages of GFMs, but also presents essential techniques for their construction, with a focus on transformers, pre-training, and adaptation strategies. Subsequently, we examine recent advancements in GFMs, including large language models, vision models, and vision-language models, particularly emphasizing the potential applications in remote sensing. Additionally, the review concludes with a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and future trends in GFMs, addressing five critical aspects: data integration, model complexity, uncertainty quantification, interdisciplinary collaboration, and concerns related to privacy, trust, and security. This review offers a comprehensive overview of emerging geoscientific research paradigms, emphasizing the untapped opportunities at the intersection of advanced AI techniques and geoscience. It examines major methodologies, showcases advances in large-scale models, and discusses the challenges and prospects that will shape the future landscape of GFMs.

Jin-Jian Xu, Hao Zhang, Chao-Sheng Tang et al.

As Earth science enters the era of big data, artificial intelligence (AI) not only offers great potential for solving geoscience problems, but also plays a critical role in accelerating the understanding of the complex, interactive, and multiscale processes of Earth's behavior. As geoscience AI models are progressively utilized for significant predictions in crucial situations, geoscience researchers are increasingly demanding their interpretability and versatility. This study proposes an interpretable geoscience artificial intelligence (XGeoS-AI) framework to unravel the mystery of image recognition in the Earth sciences, and its effectiveness and versatility is demonstrated by taking computed tomography (CT) image recognition as an example. Inspired by the mechanism of human vision, the proposed XGeoS-AI framework generates a threshold value from a local region within the whole image to complete the recognition. Different kinds of artificial intelligence (AI) methods, such as Support Vector Regression (SVR), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), can be adopted as the AI engines of the proposed XGeoS-AI framework to efficiently complete geoscience image recognition tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the effectiveness, versatility, and heuristics of the proposed framework have great potential in solving geoscience image recognition problems. Interpretable AI should receive more and more attention in the field of the Earth sciences, which is the key to promoting more rational and wider applications of AI in the field of Earth sciences. In addition, the proposed interpretable framework may be the forerunner of technological innovation in the Earth sciences.