PnP-Corrector: A Universal Correction Framework for Coupled Spatiotemporal Forecasting
Authors: Hao Wu, Fan Xu, Yuxu Lu, Penghao Zhao, Fan Zhang, Hao Jia, Yuxuan Liang, Ruijian Gou, +4 more
Abstract
Coupled spatiotemporal forecasting is important for predicting the future evolution of multiple interacting dynamical systems, such as in climate models. However, existing methods are severely constrained by the persistent bottleneck of compounding errors. In coupled systems, errors from each subsystem simulator propagate and amplify one another, a phenomenon we term Reciprocal Error Amplification, leading to a rapid collapse of long-range predictions. To address this challenge, we propose a universal framework called PnP-Corrector (Plug-and-Play Corrector). The core idea of our framework is to decouple the physical simulation from the error correction process: it freezes pre-trained physics simulation engines and exclusively trains a correction agent to proactively counteract the systematic biases emerging from the coupled system. Furthermore, we design an efficient predictive model architecture, DSLCast, to serve as the backbone of this framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the long-term stability and accuracy of coupled forecasting systems. For instance, in the challenging task of a 300-day global ocean-atmosphere coupled forecast, our PnP-Corrector framework reduces the prediction error of the baseline model by 28% and surpasses state-of-the-art models on several key metrics.
Long-horizon spacecraft trajectory forecasting suffers from error accumulation due to the absence of corrective observations in the forecast regime, making reliable uncertainty estimation crucial for safety-critical decision-making such as space domain awareness and conjunction assessment. While high-fidelity physics-based orbit propagators provide accurate deterministic forecasts, they typically lack calibrated uncertainty estimates over long horizons. We introduce a Predictor--Corrector framework in which a physics-based continuous-time deterministic forecaster is augmented with a learned continuous-time probabilistic Corrector that models forecast errors. The proposed Corrector can be wrapped around an existing deterministic propagator to improve forecast accuracy while producing sharp and calibrated full-covariance uncertainty estimates. The Corrector is based on Latent Neural Controlled Differential Equations (Latent NCDEs) and models the probabilistic temporal evolution of forecast errors in continuous time, naturally supporting irregular sampling and missing features. We further introduce a loss function that promotes calibration and sharpness in long-horizon uncertainty propagation. We evaluate the proposed framework on long-horizon spacecraft trajectory forecasting using real-world data from NASA's Crustal Dynamics Data Information System (CDDIS), wrapping the Corrector around NASA's General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT). Across forecast horizons of 2--4 days without observations and six rolling test windows, the proposed approach consistently improves accuracy and uncertainty calibration compared to deterministic baselines and Latent ODE-based correctors, demonstrating the effectiveness of the continuous-time probabilistic Corrector for trajectory forecasting.
Muhammad Bilal Shahid, Zhanhong Jiang, Soumik Sarkar +1
Modern deep-learning models have achieved remarkable success in time-series forecasting. Yet, their performance degrades in long-term prediction due to error accumulation in autoregressive inference, where predictions are recursively used as inputs. While classical error correction mechanisms (ECMs) have long been used in statistical methods, their applicability to deep learning models remains limited or ineffective. In this work, we revisit the error accumulation problem in deep time-series forecasting and investigate the role and necessity of ECMs in this new context. We propose a simple, architecture-agnostic error correction model that can be integrated with any existing forecaster without requiring retraining. By explicitly decomposing predictions into trend and seasonal components and training the corrector to adjust each separately, we introduce the Universal Error Corrector with Seasonal-Trend Decomposition (UEC-STD), which significantly improves correction accuracy and robustness across 4 backbones and 10 datasets. Our findings provide a practical tool for enhancing forecasts while offering new insights into mitigating autoregressive errors in deep time-series models. Code is available at https://github.com/DA2I2-SLM/UEC-STD.
Multi-modal spatio-temporal forecasting (MM-STF) supports weather nowcasting, traffic prediction, and earth-system modeling by combining heterogeneous sources such as physical fields, satellite imagery, and in-situ sensors. Three obstacles persist: (i) modalities have different spatio-temporal sampling rates, forcing lossy interpolation onto a unified grid; (ii) modalities are frequently missing at deployment due to sensor outages or revisit gaps, while most methods train with full availability; and (iii) autoregressive decoders accumulate errors over long horizons, amplified by multi-modal conditioning. We propose AsyncCouple-Flow to address these issues jointly. A Modality-Aware Token Sparsification (MATS) module performs scale-aware tokenization and uses a shared importance scorer to select top-k tokens per timestep, producing equal-length sequences. An Asynchronous Cross-Modal Coupling Graph (ACCG) replaces fixed cross-attention with a learnable graph whose edges encode time offsets, semantic similarity, and modality-specific physical priors, enabling fusion under arbitrary asynchrony and missingness. A Flow-Matching Forecasting Head models multi-step prediction as a conditional ODE, trained with stochastic modality dropout and integrated jointly to avoid autoregressive drift. Experiments on ERA5+GOES+ISD weather forecasting and PEMS-BAY traffic prediction with multi-source side information show that AsyncCouple-Flow outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and remains robust with up to two missing modalities. The code will be released upon acceptance.