Nengxiong Xu

Han Meng, Gang Mei, Hong Tian et al.

Rock discontinuities critically govern the mechanical behavior and stability of rock masses. Their internal distributions remain largely unobservable and are typically inferred from surface-exposed discontinuities using generative prediction approaches. However, surface-exposed observations are inherently sparse, and existing generative prediction approaches either fail to capture the underlying complex distribution patterns or lack robustness under data-sparse conditions. Here, we proposed a simple yet robust approach for statistically accurate generative prediction of rock discontinuities by utilizing a tabular foundation model. By leveraging the powerful sample learning capability of the foundation model specifically designed for small data, our approach can effectively capture the underlying complex distribution patterns within limited measured discontinuities. Comparative experiments on ten datasets with diverse scales and distribution patterns of discontinuities demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness over conventional statistical models and deep generative approaches. This work advances quantitative characterization of rock mass structures, supporting safer and more reliable data-driven geotechnical design.

Yuting Yang, Gang Mei, Zhengjing Ma et al.

Small Earth data are geoscience observations with limited short-term monitoring variability, providing sparse but meaningful measurements, typically exhibiting spatiotemporal correlations. Spatiotemporal forecasting on such data is crucial for understanding geoscientific processes despite their small scale. However, conventional deep learning models for spatiotemporal forecasting requires task-specific training for different scenarios. Foundation models do not need task-specific training, but they often exhibit forecasting bias toward the global mean of the pretraining distribution. Here we propose a simple and robust approach for spatiotemporally correlated small Earth data forecasting. The essential idea is to characterize and quantify spatiotemporal patterns of small Earth data and then utilize tabular foundation models for accurate forecasting across different scenarios. Comparative results across three typical scenarios demonstrate that our forecasting approach achieves superior accuracy compared to the graph deep learning model (T-GCN) and tabular foundation model (TabPFN) in the majority of instances, exhibiting stronger robustness.