Runmin Dong

Mengxuan Chen, Yunpu Xu, Qiuyan Sun et al.

Seasonal forecasting of summer rainfall in East Asia remains a grand challenge, as predictability at 3 to 6 month lead times is constrained by the spring predictability barrier, weak large-scale signals, and localized nonlinear convective extremes. We address this challenge with CAPES, which integrates a kilometer-resolution coupled regional model with atmosphere, land, and ocean components and a data-driven AI seasonal forecasting system. At 15 km resolution, the fused workflow combines 174 numerical members from varying start times, physics schemes, and parameter perturbations with 1,600 AI members generated from initial and physical perturbations. Using the full LineShine system, CAPES completes ten annual 1,774-member hindcasts for 2016 to 2025 within 14.6 hours, improving the mean prediction score from ECMWF's 71.8 to 75.9 and delivering a major gain in operational forecasting capability. The 1-km configuration further enables fine-scale typhoon simulation and establishes the feasibility of kilometer-scale fused ensemble forecasting on a one-week timescale.

Juepeng Zheng, Yibin Wen, Jinxiao Zhang et al.

In this paper, we firstly tackle a more realistic Domain Adaptation (DA) setting: Source-Free Blending-Target Domain Adaptation (SF-BTDA), where we can not access to source domain data while facing mixed multiple target domains without any domain labels in prior. Compared to existing DA scenarios, SF-BTDA generally faces the co-existence of different label shifts in different targets, along with noisy target pseudo labels generated from the source model. In this paper, we propose a new method called Evidential Contrastive Alignment (ECA) to decouple the blending target domain and alleviate the effect from noisy target pseudo labels. First, to improve the quality of pseudo target labels, we propose a calibrated evidential learning module to iteratively improve both the accuracy and certainty of the resulting model and adaptively generate high-quality pseudo target labels. Second, we design a graph contrastive learning with the domain distance matrix and confidence-uncertainty criterion, to minimize the distribution gap of samples of a same class in the blended target domains, which alleviates the co-existence of different label shifts in blended targets. We conduct a new benchmark based on three standard DA datasets and ECA outperforms other methods with considerable gains and achieves comparable results compared with those that have domain labels or source data in prior.

Runmin Dong, Shuai Yuan, Bin Luo et al.

Reference-based super-resolution (RefSR) has the potential to build bridges across spatial and temporal resolutions of remote sensing images. However, existing RefSR methods are limited by the faithfulness of content reconstruction and the effectiveness of texture transfer in large scaling factors. Conditional diffusion models have opened up new opportunities for generating realistic high-resolution images, but effectively utilizing reference images within these models remains an area for further exploration. Furthermore, content fidelity is difficult to guarantee in areas without relevant reference information. To solve these issues, we propose a change-aware diffusion model named Ref-Diff for RefSR, using the land cover change priors to guide the denoising process explicitly. Specifically, we inject the priors into the denoising model to improve the utilization of reference information in unchanged areas and regulate the reconstruction of semantically relevant content in changed areas. With this powerful guidance, we decouple the semantics-guided denoising and reference texture-guided denoising processes to improve the model performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art RefSR methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The code and data are available at https://github.com/dongrunmin/RefDiff.

Fan Wei, Runmin Dong, Yushan Lai et al.

Diffusion-based remote sensing (RS) generative foundation models are cruial for downstream tasks. However, these models rely on large amounts of globally representative data, which often contain redundancy, noise, and class imbalance, reducing training efficiency and preventing convergence. Existing RS diffusion foundation models typically aggregate multiple classification datasets or apply simplistic deduplication, overlooking the distributional requirements of generation modeling and the heterogeneity of RS imagery. To address these limitations, we propose a training-free, two-stage data pruning approach that quickly select a high-quality subset under high pruning ratios, enabling a preliminary foundation model to converge rapidly and serve as a versatile backbone for generation, downstream fine-tuning, and other applications. Our method jointly considers local information content with global scene-level diversity and representativeness. First, an entropy-based criterion efficiently removes low-information samples. Next, leveraging RS scene classification datasets as reference benchmarks, we perform scene-aware clustering with stratified sampling to improve clustering effectiveness while reducing computational costs on large-scale unlabeled data. Finally, by balancing cluster-level uniformity and sample representativeness, the method enables fine-grained selection under high pruning ratios while preserving overall diversity and representativeness. Experiments show that, even after pruning 85\% of the training data, our method significantly improves convergence and generation quality. Furthermore, diffusion foundation models trained with our method consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance across downstream tasks, including super-resolution and semantic image synthesis. This data pruning paradigm offers practical guidance for developing RS generative foundation models.

Yunkai Yang, Yudong Zhang, Kunquan Zhang et al.

With the rapid progress of controllable generation, training data synthesis has become a promising way to expand labeled datasets and alleviate manual annotation in remote sensing (RS). However, the complexity of semantic mask control and the uncertainty of sampling quality often limit the utility of synthetic data in downstream semantic segmentation tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a task-oriented data synthesis framework (TODSynth), including a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) with unified triple attention and a plug-and-play sampling strategy guided by task feedback. Built upon the powerful DiT-based generative foundation model, we systematically evaluate different control schemes, showing that a text-image-mask joint attention scheme combined with full fine-tuning of the image and mask branches significantly enhances the effectiveness of RS semantic segmentation data synthesis, particularly in few-shot and complex-scene scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a control-rectify flow matching (CRFM) method, which dynamically adjusts sampling directions guided by semantic loss during the early high-plasticity stage, mitigating the instability of generated images and bridging the gap between synthetic data and downstream segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art controllable generation methods, producing more stable and task-oriented synthetic data for RS semantic segmentation.

Weijia Li, Jinhua Yu, Dairong Chen et al.

In this work, we propose a geometry-aware semi-supervised framework for fine-grained building function recognition, utilizing geometric relationships among multi-source data to enhance pseudo-label accuracy in semi-supervised learning, broadening its applicability to various building function categorization systems. Firstly, we design an online semi-supervised pre-training stage, which facilitates the precise acquisition of building facade location information in street-view images. In the second stage, we propose a geometry-aware coarse annotation generation module. This module effectively combines GIS data and street-view data based on the geometric relationships, improving the accuracy of pseudo annotations. In the third stage, we combine the newly generated coarse annotations with the existing labeled dataset to achieve fine-grained functional recognition of buildings across multiple cities at a large scale. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework exhibits superior performance in fine-grained functional recognition of buildings. Within the same categorization system, it achieves improvements of 7.6\% and 4.8\% compared to fully-supervised methods and state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods, respectively. Additionally, our method also performs well in cross-city scenarios, i.e., extending the model trained on OmniCity (New York) to new cities (i.e., Los Angeles and Boston) with different building function categorization systems. This study offers a new solution for large-scale multi-city applications with minimal annotation requirements, facilitating more efficient data updates and resource allocation in urban management.

Bin Luo, Runmin Dong, Zhaoyang Luo et al.

Diffusion-based methods demonstrate significant potential for remote sensing image super-resolution at large scaling factors, particularly in reference-based super-resolution (RefSR) where high-resolution reference images provide critical fine-grained texture priors. However, existing methods often suffer from a trade-off between over-reliance on reference information, which leads to texture artifacts, and underutilization, which results in insufficient detail recovery. To address these issues, we propose DS-DiT, a Decoupled Siamese Diffusion Transformer method that decouples low-resolution and reference interactions at the attention level. By enabling low-resolution structural priors and reference texture information to interact independently with the noisy latent, the framework effectively mitigates inter-source competition. Furthermore, to compensate for the limited local modeling ability of global attention, we introduce a Patch-Level Weights (PLW) module that adaptively modulates the fusion of conditional sources. In addition, this siamese architecture facilitates an autoguidance strategy during inference, which enhances reconstruction by exploiting the prediction discrepancy between strong and weak reference conditions. This approach boosts generation quality without additional training. Experimental results across multiple datasets and scaling factors demonstrate that DS-DiT outperforms existing methods in both quantitative metrics and visual fidelity.

Shilei Cao, Juepeng Zheng, Yan Liu et al.

Real-world application models are commonly deployed in dynamic environments, where the target domain distribution undergoes temporal changes. Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) has recently emerged as a promising technique to gradually adapt a source-trained model to continually changing target domains. Despite recent advancements in addressing CTTA, two critical issues remain: 1) Fixed thresholds for pseudo-labeling in existing methodologies lead to low-quality pseudo-labels, as model confidence varies across categories and domains; 2) Stochastic parameter restoration methods for mitigating catastrophic forgetting fail to preserve critical information effectively, due to their intrinsic randomness. To tackle these challenges for detection models in CTTA scenarios, we present AMROD, featuring three core components. Firstly, the object-level contrastive learning module extracts object-level features for contrastive learning to refine the feature representation in the target domain. Secondly, the adaptive monitoring module dynamically skips unnecessary adaptation and updates the category-specific threshold based on predicted confidence scores to enable efficiency and improve the quality of pseudo-labels. Lastly, the adaptive randomized restoration mechanism selectively reset inactive parameters with higher possibilities, ensuring the retention of essential knowledge. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AMROD on four CTTA object detection tasks, where AMROD outperforms existing methods, especially achieving a 3.2 mAP improvement and a 20\% increase in efficiency on the Cityscapes-to-Cityscapes-C CTTA task. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/ShileiCao/AMROD.

Jinxiao Zhang, Runmin Dong, Xiyong Wu et al.

Earth observation is becoming one of the largest data-producing activities in science, yet current pipelines still treat compression as a storage and transmission tool rather than a new way to use data. We present a generative compression framework that learns from historical Earth observation archives and enables on-demand 100x to 10,000x data reduction across downstream tasks. Unlike general visual data, Earth observation repeatedly measures the same evolving planet, making historical-prior learning feasible for extreme compression. To realize this paradigm, we train large generative compression models at exascale on the LineShine Armv9 CPU supercomputer, with co-optimization across model design, kernels, memory hierarchy, runtime, and parallelism. Our implementation sustains 1.54 EFLOP/s and peaks at 2.16 EFLOP/s in end-to-end training. This work shows that historical-prior generative compression can turn Earth observation data into an active, task-adaptive foundation for acquisition, delivery, storage, and scientific use.

Jienan Lyu, Miao Yang, Jinchen Cai et al.

Fine-grained high-resolution remote sensing mapping typically relies on localized visual features, which restricts cross-domain generalizability and often leads to fragmented predictions of large-scale land covers. While global geospatial foundation models offer powerful, generalizable representations, directly fusing their high-dimensional implicit embeddings with high-resolution visual features frequently triggers feature interference and spatial structure degradation due to a severe semantic-spatial gap. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Structure-Semantic Decoupled Modulation (SSDM) framework, which decouples global geospatial representations into two complementary cross-modal injection pathways. First, the structural prior modulation branch introduces the macroscopic receptive field priors from global representations into the self-attention modules of the high-resolution encoder. By guiding local feature extraction with holistic structural constraints, it effectively suppresses prediction fragmentation caused by high-frequency detail noise and excessive intra-class variance. Second, the global semantic injection branch explicitly aligns holistic context with the deep high-resolution feature space and directly supplements global semantics via cross-modal integration, thereby significantly enhancing the semantic consistency and category-level discrimination of complex land covers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing cross-modal fusion approaches. By unleashing the potential of global embeddings, SSDM consistently improves high-resolution mapping accuracy across diverse scenarios, providing a universal and effective paradigm for integrating geospatial foundation models into high-resolution vision tasks.

Lixian Zhang, Runmin Dong, Shuai Yuan et al.

Nighttime light (NTL) remote sensing observation serves as a unique proxy for quantitatively assessing progress toward meeting a series of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as poverty estimation, urban sustainable development, and carbon emission. However, existing NTL observations often suffer from pervasive degradation and inconsistency, limiting their utility for computing the indicators defined by the SDGs. In this study, we propose a novel approach to reconstruct high-resolution NTL images using multi-modal remote sensing data. To support this research endeavor, we introduce DeepLightMD, a comprehensive dataset comprising data from five heterogeneous sensors, offering fine spatial resolution and rich spectral information at a national scale. Additionally, we present DeepLightSR, a calibration-aware method for building bridges between spatially heterogeneous modality data in the multi-modality super-resolution. DeepLightSR integrates calibration-aware alignment, an auxiliary-to-main multi-modality fusion, and an auxiliary-embedded refinement to effectively address spatial heterogeneity, fuse diversely representative features, and enhance performance in $8\times$ super-resolution (SR) tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of DeepLightSR over 8 competing methods, as evidenced by improvements in PSNR (2.01 dB $ \sim $ 13.25 dB) and PIQE (0.49 $ \sim $ 9.32). Our findings underscore the practical significance of our proposed dataset and model in reconstructing high-resolution NTL data, supporting efficiently and quantitatively assessing the SDG progress.

Lixian Zhang, Yi Zhao, Runmin Dong et al.

Vast amounts of remote sensing (RS) data provide Earth observations across multiple dimensions, encompassing critical spatial, temporal, and spectral information which is essential for addressing global-scale challenges such as land use monitoring, disaster prevention, and environmental change mitigation. Despite various pre-training methods tailored to the characteristics of RS data, a key limitation persists: the inability to effectively integrate spatial, temporal, and spectral information within a single unified model. To unlock the potential of RS data, we construct a Spatial-Temporal-Spectral Structured Dataset (STSSD) characterized by the incorporation of multiple RS sources, diverse coverage, unified locations within image sets, and heterogeneity within images. Building upon this structured dataset, we propose an Anchor-Aware Masked AutoEncoder method (A$^{2}$-MAE), leveraging intrinsic complementary information from the different kinds of images and geo-information to reconstruct the masked patches during the pre-training phase. A$^{2}$-MAE integrates an anchor-aware masking strategy and a geographic encoding module to comprehensively exploit the properties of RS images. Specifically, the proposed anchor-aware masking strategy dynamically adapts the masking process based on the meta-information of a pre-selected anchor image, thereby facilitating the training on images captured by diverse types of RS sources within one model. Furthermore, we propose a geographic encoding method to leverage accurate spatial patterns, enhancing the model generalization capabilities for downstream applications that are generally location-related. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves comprehensive improvements across various downstream tasks compared with existing RS pre-training methods, including image classification, semantic segmentation, and change detection tasks.

Xin-Yi Tong, Runmin Dong, Xiao Xiang Zhu

Land cover information is indispensable for advancing the United Nations' sustainable development goals, and land cover mapping under a more detailed category system would significantly contribute to economic livelihood tracking and environmental degradation measurement. However, the substantial difficulty in acquiring fine-grained training data makes the implementation of this task particularly challenging. Here, we propose to combine fully labeled source domain and weakly labeled target domain for weakly supervised domain adaptation (WSDA). This is beneficial as the utilization of sparse and coarse weak labels can considerably alleviate the labor required for precise and detailed land cover annotation. Specifically, we introduce the Prototype-based pseudo-label Rectification and Expansion (PRE) approach, which leverages the prototypes (i.e., the class-wise feature centroids) as the bridge to connect sparse labels and global feature distributions. According to the feature distances to the prototypes, the confidence of pseudo-labels predicted in the unlabeled regions of the target domain is assessed. This confidence is then utilized to guide the dynamic expansion and rectification of pseudo-labels. Based on PRE, we carry out high categorical resolution land cover mapping for 10 cities in different regions around the world, severally using PlanetScope, Gaofen-1, and Sentinel-2 satellite images. In the study areas, we achieve cross-sensor, cross-category, and cross-continent WSDA, with the overall accuracy exceeding 80%. The promising results indicate that PRE is capable of reducing the dependency of land cover classification on high-quality annotations, thereby improving label efficiency. We expect our work to enable global fine-grained land cover mapping, which in turn promote Earth observation to provide more precise and thorough information for environmental monitoring.

Mengxuan Chen, Ziqi Yuan, Jinxiao Zhang et al.

Operational weather forecasting models have advanced for decades on both the explicit numerical solvers and the empirical physical parameterization schemes. However, the involved high computational costs and uncertainties in these existing schemes are requiring potential improvements through alternative machine learning methods. Previous works use a unified model to learn the dynamics and physics of the atmospheric model. Contrarily, we propose a simple yet effective machine learning model that learns the horizontal movement in the dynamical core and vertical movement in the physical parameterization separately. By replacing the advection with a graph attention network and the convection with a multi-layer perceptron, our model provides a new and efficient perspective to simulate the transition of variables in atmospheric models. We also assess the model's performance over a 5-day iterative forecasting. Under the same input variables and training methods, our model outperforms existing data-driven methods with a significantly-reduced number of parameters with a resolution of 5.625 deg. Overall, this work aims to contribute to the ongoing efforts that leverage machine learning techniques for improving both the accuracy and efficiency of global weather forecasting.

Juepeng Zheng, Haohuan Fu, Weijia Li et al.

Providing an accurate evaluation of palm tree plantation in a large region can bring meaningful impacts in both economic and ecological aspects. However, the enormous spatial scale and the variety of geological features across regions has made it a grand challenge with limited solutions based on manual human monitoring efforts. Although deep learning based algorithms have demonstrated potential in forming an automated approach in recent years, the labelling efforts needed for covering different features in different regions largely constrain its effectiveness in large-scale problems. In this paper, we propose a novel domain adaptive oil palm tree detection method, i.e., a Multi-level Attention Domain Adaptation Network (MADAN) to reap cross-regional oil palm tree counting and detection. MADAN consists of 4 procedures: First, we adopted a batch-instance normalization network (BIN) based feature extractor for improving the generalization ability of the model, integrating batch normalization and instance normalization. Second, we embedded a multi-level attention mechanism (MLA) into our architecture for enhancing the transferability, including a feature level attention and an entropy level attention. Then we designed a minimum entropy regularization (MER) to increase the confidence of the classifier predictions through assigning the entropy level attention value to the entropy penalty. Finally, we employed a sliding window-based prediction and an IOU based post-processing approach to attain the final detection results. We conducted comprehensive ablation experiments using three different satellite images of large-scale oil palm plantation area with six transfer tasks. MADAN improves the detection accuracy by 14.98% in terms of average F1-score compared with the Baseline method (without DA), and performs 3.55%-14.49% better than existing domain adaptation methods.