27.7AO-PHMay 22
Seeing Inside the Storm: Improving Nowcasting by Integrating Meteorological DriversMinghui Qiu, Jun Chen, Lin Chen et al.
Most nowcasting systems, built on radar reflectivity, focus on current precipitation, ignoring the atmospheric precursors -- such as low-level convergence, turbulent eddies, and latent heating -- that offer a fleeting window to foresee storm birth. We introduce MeteoLogist, a physics-inspired radar intelligence framework that models the full life cycle of convection -- from its precursors to organized storm evolution. However, exploiting these precursors is non-trivial: they originate from multiple meteorological drivers -- thermodynamic, kinematic, and microphysical -- that evolve asynchronously (C1) and remain spatially fragmented (C2). To this end, MeteoLogist designs three tightly integrated components. The Physics-Tailored Encoders process radar echoes according to their intrinsic physical scales and semantics, forming thermodynamic, kinematic, and microphysical streams that capture distinct dynamical regimes. The Temporal-Phase Aligner addresses C1 by leveraging causal temporal attention to capture when and how different drivers interact and activate. The Cross-Field Spatial Aggregator addresses C2 through cross-regional fusion, aligning weak and scattered precursors across neighboring cells to expose upstream triggers and enforce spatial coherence. Evaluated on 3D-NEXRAD (2020--2022, US-wide), MeteoLogist boosts high-impact detection (CSI40) by +9.7% over strong baselines, and achieves a remarkable 37.67% gain during the storm-developing stage -- demonstrating true foresight in sensing storms before they appear. The code can be found in the supplementary material.
LGOct 29, 2024
Hierarchical Structure Sharing Empowers Multi-task Heterogeneous GNNs for Customer ExpansionXinyue Feng, Shuxin Zhong, Jinquan Hang et al.
Customer expansion, i.e., growing a business existing customer base by acquiring new customers, is critical for scaling operations and sustaining the long-term profitability of logistics companies. Although state-of-the-art works model this task as a single-node classification problem under a heterogeneous graph learning framework and achieve good performance, they struggle with extremely positive label sparsity issues in our scenario. Multi-task learning (MTL) offers a promising solution by introducing a correlated, label-rich task to enhance the label-sparse task prediction through knowledge sharing. However, existing MTL methods result in performance degradation because they fail to discriminate task-shared and task-specific structural patterns across tasks. This issue arises from their limited consideration of the inherently complex structure learning process of heterogeneous graph neural networks, which involves the multi-layer aggregation of multi-type relations. To address the challenge, we propose a Structure-Aware Hierarchical Information Sharing Framework (SrucHIS), which explicitly regulates structural information sharing across tasks in logistics customer expansion. SrucHIS breaks down the structure learning phase into multiple stages and introduces sharing mechanisms at each stage, effectively mitigating the influence of task-specific structural patterns during each stage. We evaluate StrucHIS on both private and public datasets, achieving a 51.41% average precision improvement on the private dataset and a 10.52% macro F1 gain on the public dataset. StrucHIS is further deployed at one of the largest logistics companies in China and demonstrates a 41.67% improvement in the success contract-signing rate over existing strategies, generating over 453K new orders within just two months.
LGOct 2, 2025
RainSeer: Fine-Grained Rainfall Reconstruction via Physics-Guided ModelingLin Chen, Jun Chen, Minghui Qiu et al.
Reconstructing high-resolution rainfall fields is essential for flood forecasting, hydrological modeling, and climate analysis. However, existing spatial interpolation methods-whether based on automatic weather station (AWS) measurements or enhanced with satellite/radar observations often over-smooth critical structures, failing to capture sharp transitions and localized extremes. We introduce RainSeer, a structure-aware reconstruction framework that reinterprets radar reflectivity as a physically grounded structural prior-capturing when, where, and how rain develops. This shift, however, introduces two fundamental challenges: (i) translating high-resolution volumetric radar fields into sparse point-wise rainfall observations, and (ii) bridging the physical disconnect between aloft hydro-meteors and ground-level precipitation. RainSeer addresses these through a physics-informed two-stage architecture: a Structure-to-Point Mapper performs spatial alignment by projecting mesoscale radar structures into localized ground-level rainfall, through a bidirectional mapping, and a Geo-Aware Rain Decoder captures the semantic transformation of hydro-meteors through descent, melting, and evaporation via a causal spatiotemporal attention mechanism. We evaluate RainSeer on two public datasets-RAIN-F (Korea, 2017-2019) and MeteoNet (France, 2016-2018)-and observe consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines, reducing MAE by over 13.31% and significantly enhancing structural fidelity in reconstructed rainfall fields.