Spatiotemporal Forecasting

Latest papers 279

Oct 8, 2026cs.LG

Just Weather Scoring: Efficient End-to-end Nowcasting with Distributional Diffusion

Generative diffusion models are well-suited for probabilistic precipitation nowcasting, but existing approaches often rely on separately trained compression or deterministic forecasting components and remain costly at inference due to iterative denoising. We introduce Just Weather Scoring (JWS), a single-stage, end-to-end diffusion model which addresses both issues by forecasting directly in radar space and enabling few-step generation. Radar-space modeling greatly simplifies training and inference and eliminates uncertainty arising from lossy compression. JWS combines Masked Asynchronous Diffusion, a timestep-sampling scheme that preserves clean context while adapting diffusion training to high-dimensional spatio-temporal data, with a simple scoring-rule objective that aligns training with probabilistic forecasting and unlocks few-step generation. On the SEVIR and MeteoNet benchmarks, JWS achieves state-of-the-art probabilistic forecasting performance at reduced training and inference cost. Even our smallest model remains competitive using substantially fewer parameters and more than 17x faster inference.
Oct 8, 2026cs.CV

Revisiting Identity and Spectra Dispersion in Media-Bridged Time Series Forecasting: Linking Multivariate Signals and Narrative Flows

Media-bridged time series forecasting is expanding to encompass traditional "multivariate" and emerging "multimodal" (e.g., through textual assistance). Existing Time Series Forecasting (TSF) models still rely on paradigm-specific relation, fusion, and temporal modules, hindering a common forecasting backbone across numerical and pre-aligned narrative-flow settings. To explore this, we propose the Multimedia Identity-Aware Prism Network (MIDAPN), a unified spatiotemporal forecasting backbone based on media-general graph adaptation and automatic temporal learning: (1) Following media pre-alignment, our Multimedia Identity-Aware Graph (MIDAG) revisits identity through static essence, dynamic behavior, and latent commonality, inducing affinities that extend variable-specific dependencies across media. Contextual Identity Modulation (CIM) further refines discriminative aggregation. (2) We develop Spectral Prism Convolution (SPConv) to automatically perform hierarchical temporal analysis, balancing coarse trends and fine-grained details. Meanwhile, its Adaptive Search Guidance configures a scale-efficient architecture for temporal-dimension reconstruction. These decoupled yet synergistic components jointly address media identity disentanglement and temporal-scale mismatch. Comprehensive evaluations involving 16 SOTA TSF models across 13 "multivariate" and 12 "multimodal" datasets, alongside targeted long-context comparisons against 14 time series foundation models and fused pretrained language models, demonstrate MIDAPN's consistent superiority and broad shared backbone compatibility. The code is available at https://github.com/MIDAPN.
Oct 8, 2026cs.CV

TAM: Task-Aware Memory Distillation for Efficient Spatiotemporal Prediction

Knowledge distillation enables efficient spatiotemporal prediction by transferring knowledge from an accurate teacher to a compact student. However, matching outputs or features independently for each sample leaves cross-sample predictive structure underused. Exploiting this structure requires representations and historical references that reflect the dynamics of each task. We propose TAM, a Task-Aware Memory Distillation framework that organizes a frozen teacher's knowledge into a bounded, retrievable history. Memory entries encode latent features, forecast changes, or flow residuals, while task-specific selection rules identify relevant historical references. The student either matches the teacher's similarity distribution over shared references or regresses observation-conditioned residual prototypes. These objectives complement supervised prediction and conventional distillation. The teacher, memory, and auxiliary adapters are used only during training, leaving student inference unchanged. We evaluate TAM on video prediction, weather forecasting, and traffic flow prediction across multiple teacher-student configurations. Averaged over four paired runs, adding TAM improves SSIM on all six video datasets and reduces MSE on five relative to the corresponding KD baselines. Mean paired MSE reductions reach 1.86% on KittiCaltech, 1.93% on WeatherBench with a gSTA teacher, and 1.01% on TaxiBJ. These results demonstrate the utility of historical teacher supervision across distinct forecasting tasks without additional student inference cost.
Oct 7, 2026cs.CV

MESSENGER: Memory-Enhanced Sequential Scene Flow Estimation via Autoregressive Next-Frame Forecasting

Scene flow can capture low-level 3D motion displacements in dynamic scenarios. Early pairwise estimators relying on instantaneous two-frame motion lack long-term temporal correlation and also struggle with poor extrapolation ability in future prediction. Although some recent methods attempt to explore multi-frame scene flow estimation in a sequence-to-sequence manner, they typically suffer from heavy computational overhead with increasing input frames and long-horizon prediction degradation due to ineffective motion propagation. To address these problems, we propose a novel memory-enhanced sequential scene flow pipeline, called MESSENGER. To sufficiently mine long-term temporal dependencies naturally within consecutive sequences, a memory buffer is designed by explicitly storing multiple history flow estimates and latent states. For each input frame, the temporally stored flows and states are correlated and retrieved to predict the current initialized flow in a next-frame forecasting manner. Furthermore, we develop an uncertainty-aware reweighting module to filter unreliable retrievals and mitigate accumulated errors. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our MESSENGER, reducing EPE3D by 71.6% on nuScenes and 67.7% on Argoverse 2 in long-horizon future extrapolation. This superiority can be attributed to our designed autoregressive forecasting paradigm, which naturally forces the network to progressively learn the next-frame distribution based on history observations. Code will be released at https://github.com/liujiuming123/Messenger.
Oct 7, 2026cs.LG

WxFM-XL: Adapting Univariate Foundation Models to Multi-Station Weather Forecasting

With the rise of univariate time series foundation models (e.g., Sundial, Timer), initial efforts have been made to extend them to multivariate settings. However, these models mainly focus on modeling correlations among variables. When they are applied to multi-station weather forecasting, two important factors are often overlooked: (1) the spatial information of stations, and (2) different error priors of different stations relative to the foundation model. In this paper, we propose WxFM-XL, a model for adapting univariate time series foundation models to multi-station weather forecasting. WxFM-XL introduces a cross-station error correlation prior graph to capture stationwise error priors with respect to the foundation model. Building on this, we further propose a dynamic fusion mechanism that adaptively integrates a spatial correlation graph with the error correlation prior graph. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state of the art baselines.
Oct 6, 2026stat.ME

Prediction-powered inference for time series across space

The following motif is common in spatiotemporal settings: we have a sequence of covariate and label pairs observed for a relatively short, recent time period. We have access to unlabeled covariates over a longer time period. Data is observed over many spatial locations. For instance, crop yield might be observed over a large geographical area for recent years, but weather data (which is informative about crop yield) is available for a much longer period. The goal is to estimate, at each spatial location, the expected label (e.g., crop yield) in the future and provide a valid confidence interval for this value. The observed time period alone is too short for reliable estimates. Imputing missing labels with machine learning can cause substantial bias. Prediction-powered inference (PPI) can correct for this bias, but it relies on an i.i.d. assumption that breaks under our expected temporal dependencies. Heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) procedures account for temporal correlation, but have not been adapted to cases where some labels are imputed. We provide reliable point estimates and confidence intervals given: short labeled time series (across spatial locations), a longer unlabeled time series, and an imperfect predictor of labels given covariates. We show our method outperforms natural alternatives.
Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

Towards Explainable Benchmarking for Data-driven Post-Wildfire Debris Flow Prediction

Post-wildfire debris flows (PFDFs) are destructive sediment-laden hazards triggered when intense rainfall strikes recently burned terrain, destabilizing hillslopes and threatening infrastructure, local economies, and community safety. Data-driven methods have been proposed to learn predictive patterns directly from historical PFDF observations. However, the current research landscape of data-driven PFDF prediction remains highly fragmented across feature spaces, model architectures, and evaluation protocols, making rigorous comparison and the derivation of scientific insights difficult. Moreover, existing studies lack a systematic investigation into the relative importance of heterogeneous factors (e.g., meteorological conditions, terrain characteristics, soil properties, and burn severity) in triggering PFDF. To address these limitations, we present a unified benchmark for data-driven PFDF prediction, enabling fair and comprehensive evaluation across diverse models and feature configurations. Furthermore, to better understand the underlying drivers of PFDF formation, we propose a reinforcement learning-based feature selection framework that identifies factors whose perturbations render positive and negative events indistinguishable, thereby discovering the regional underlying mechanisms of PFDF occurrence across regions. Our code and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/KINDLab-Fly/PFDF-Benchmark.
Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

Can LLM-assisted regularization increase forecast accuracy for migration flows in low data regimes?

Predicting migration flows remains a significant challenge for traditional gravity-based forecasting models, which primarily rely on structured socio-economic indicators such as economic disparity, political stability, and geographic distance. This work investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can improve migration forecasting by extracting contextual migration-related signals from news articles and incorporating them into a weighted Lasso forecasting framework through feature-specific regularization penalties. The proposed framework uses hierarchical LLM inference pipelines to classify migration-related push--pull signals from news data and evaluates the resulting forecasting performance across multiple migration corridors between November 2021 and November 2022, including Mexico--United States, Ukraine--Poland, and Syria--Turkey. Experimental results showed mixed performance across migration corridors and modeling strategies, and no single regularization approach consistently outperformed the others across all experiments. The best-performing Mexico configuration, which consisted of a gravity-based model augmented with the proposed push--pull ratios, achieved a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 17.15%, while the strongest Syria configuration achieved a MAPE of 29.29% using Direct LLM-Lasso. For Ukraine, the best-performing configuration used LLM-Assisted Regularization (AR) and achieved a MAPE of 41.05%. Overall, the results suggest that contextual article-derived features and LLM-guided regularization can improve migration forecasting under certain conditions, although migration corridor characteristics, article volume, and hyperparameter configuration strongly influenced performance.
Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

WaveGSSM: Graph Wave State Space Models for Propagating Spatio-Temporal Patterns

Spatio-temporal graph models typically encode each snapshot with a GNN and then connect the resulting representations through a temporal module. This space-then-time design is effective, yet it does not explicitly represent how a pattern moves across the graph. We show empirically that, for a propagating process, the same present field can lead to different futures when its recent rate of change differs, motivating an explicit representation of motion in the predictive state. We introduce WaveGSSM, a second-order graph state-space model that maintains two coupled latent states at each node, one for the current pattern and one for its temporal rate of change. A graph-wave transition updates the motion state through graph interactions and uses it to advance the pattern state, coupling spatial propagation and temporal evolution within a single rollout. We evaluate WaveGSSM on four temporal-graph benchmarks and global weather forecasting. It consistently achieves the best mean performance across the temporal-graph benchmarks and reduces the geopotential RMSE by 20.2% on average for 1- to 5-day weather forecasts relative to a backbone-matched snapshot model, while better preserving large-scale atmospheric patterns.
Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

Skillful Data-Driven Subseasonal Soil Moisture Forecasting: Prospects and Limits for Flash Drought Prediction

Despite substantial progress in short-to-medium-range weather forecasting, predicting high-impact events such as flash droughts remains a key challenge for both early warning operations and physically-based subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) prediction systems. Here we demonstrate that, for S2S soil-moisture forecasting over Europe, forecast skill depends as much on how the prediction problem is formulated as on the forecasting model itself. Using a Vision Transformer-based architecture with dual-pathway temporal and spatial attention, we show that residual learning is essential to outperform persistence. This advantage is realized only when forecasting root-zone soil moisture in physical units rather than standardized anomalies, revealing that the target representation itself constrains predictability. A probabilistic extension via quantile-head fine-tuning further provides well-calibrated predictive distributions. Benchmarked against deep-learning and operational ECMWF S2S baselines over 2021-2022, our model achieves the highest deterministic and probabilistic skill at all lead times and reliably detects anomalously dry root-zone states (below the 20th percentile). Yet flash drought onset, defined by multi-pentad intensification criteria, remains a fundamental challenge shared across all current S2S systems. These findings advance data-driven S2S soil-moisture forecasting while highlighting the remaining challenge of predicting rapid drought development.
Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

Planetary Geospatial Foundation Models: A New Paradigm for Global Public Health

The efficacy of traditional disease prediction is limited by spatial gaps and temporal lags, which impact the timing and targets of resource deployments. Outbreaks escalate undetected, chronic disease burdens are quantified years later, and at-risk populations in data-sparse regions remain unaddressed. Planetary geospatial foundation models complement existing epidemiological workflows to provide operational improvements, encoding multimodal search, mobility, and environmental signals into generalizable place representations. As illustrations of this complementarity, we present independent global health case studies of Google Earth AI's Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM) -- a foundation model for geospatial inference -- across four domains (vaccine-preventable, communicable, noncommunicable, maternal mental health), five tasks (spatial extrapolation, interpolation/nowcasting, probabilistic forecasting, prospective forecasting, risk stratification), and four countries (USA, Canada, Mexico, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Across these case studies, PDFM addresses critical surveillance gaps across domains: improving US-Canada border MMR vaccination coverage predictions by capturing cross-border behavioral spillovers domestic models miss; nowcasting cardiovascular disease to accelerate data availability; enhancing short-term municipal Mexican dengue forecasts for timely outbreak vector control; improving forecasts of cholera hotspots; and adding a transferable signal to individual-level postpartum-depression risk prediction in US states the model had never seen, while not replacing individual socioeconomic data or closing demographic screening gaps. Together, these results showcase capabilities of geospatial foundation models for public health surveillance.
Oct 1, 2026cs.LG

Physics-Refined Spatiotemporal Forecasting on Open-Boundary Hydrologic Graphs

Spatiotemporal forecasting on hydrologic graphs is especially prone to instability in open-boundary systems, where the forecast domain exchanges fluxes with an unobserved exterior. In such systems, boundary nodes receive external forcing, e.g., upstream inflows in rivers or tidal signals in coastal regions, that is typically unavailable at prediction time. The absence of this information can compound errors as forecasts unfold in an autoregressive fashion, leading to inferior long-horizon performance. This paper dissects this instability issue by exploring two questions. 1) What boundary forcing enters the forecast domain when information beyond the boundary is missing? 2) How should this forcing propagate through the domain without incurring error amplification under autoregressive rollout? To address both, we propose a new computing framework comprising two key components. First, to compensate for the boundary forcing, our framework learns ghost node proxies from the boundary and interior nodes, striving to approximate unobserved external inputs. Second, to control error accumulation from these learned proxies, we leverage two physics refiners. In particular, one refiner enforces local consistency by aligning ghost proxies with their two-hop neighbors (i.e., boundary nodes and their immediate interiors). The other refiner enhances global stability by correcting the model forecasts through a physics-guided graph neural operator, reducing long-horizon numerical drift. Two real-world hydrologic graphs are employed for empirical evaluation. Comparative results show that our proposal enjoys higher prediction accuracy and long-horizon stability over both learning-based and physics-informed model competitors.
Sep 30, 2026cs.RO

FORTE: Forecasting Occupancy for Spatiotemporal Risk-Aware Planning in Dynamic Environments

Safe navigation in dynamic environments requires anticipating future environmental states to account for spatiotemporal risks, specifically when and where collisions may occur. To this end, occupancy grid map (OGM) prediction has been widely adopted as an effective approach. However, existing OGM-based navigation methods often struggle to achieve accurate and efficient forecasting and fail to fully exploit the temporal information in predicted OGMs during planning. To address these challenges, we propose FORTE, a navigation framework that directly exploits the spatiotemporal evolution of predicted occupancy from the perspectives of spatiotemporal occupancy overlap and occupancy directivity. Based on these properties, FORTE evaluates multiple topology-distinct paths and selects the suitable one without explicit object detection or tracking. To support online planning, we formulate a latent diffusion model-based OGM predictor that generates the entire forecast horizon in a non-autoregressive manner while maintaining temporal consistency through temporal shift modules. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that FORTE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. For prediction, FORTE achieves up to 215.3% higher IoU and 5.24x faster inference; for navigation, it yields up to a 3.5x higher success rate.
Sep 30, 2026cs.LG

STCFormer: Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Modeling with Dynamic Cluster Transformer for Station-based Weather Forecasting

Station-based weather forecasting supports daily life and economic activity, yet accurate forecasts require modeling complex spatial dependencies among stations. Recent clustering-based selective modeling offers a promising alternative to dense inter-station interactions. However, a grouping shared across an observation window may obscure local changes in station relationships, while intra-cluster interactions alone may miss important global context. The theoretical advantages of selective interactions over dense connectivity also remain insufficiently understood. We therefore propose STCFormer, an adaptive spatio-temporal Transformer that dynamically groups stations according to their local evolution within each temporal patch. Its Cluster-Guided Attention Block combines fine-grained local attention within clusters and global attention over regional state summaries, allowing each station to access information beyond its own cluster. We further show that a derived Lipschitz upper bound for cluster-conditioned local attention is no larger than its fully connected counterpart, explaining a potential robustness benefit and motivating the design of InfoLoss. Experiments on three real-world weather datasets spanning eight temperature and wind forecasting tasks show that STCFormer achieves the lowest 24-hour mean squared error on all eight tasks and ranks first or second in 47 of 48 comparisons across metrics and forecasting horizons. Ablations and case studies further confirm the benefits of locally adaptive grouping and complementary local-global interactions. Our code can be obtained at https://github.com/hnu-vis/STCFormer.
Sep 30, 2026cs.LG

M2^2Weather: A Benchmark for Joint Multi-Station and Multi-Variable Weather Forecasting

Station weather forecasting is fundamentally shaped by both complex spatial dependencies across stations and strong physical coupling among weather variables. However, existing studies often consider these relationships separately and use different datasets and experimental settings, hindering systematic assessment of their individual and joint contributions. In this paper, we introduce M2M^2Weather, a benchmark for joint multi-station and multi-variable weather forecasting. Through multi-criteria quality control and station stratification, we collect 2,809 high-quality stations with 5 physically coupled weather variables across three spatial scales: France, Europe, and Global. This multi-scale design lets us examine whether conclusions persist from national to global station networks. We also introduce unified training and evaluation protocols to enable fair comparison of different station-variable modeling paradigms. To further examine the benefits of modeling station-variable relationships, we design a lightweight, plug-and-play adapter. With a trained weather forecasting model, this adapter can introduce missing station or variable relationships without retraining the model. This enables fair and efficient investigation of station-variable relationships. Systematic evaluation of 16 representative models shows the benefits of jointly modeling station and variable relationships. Completing missing relationships further reduces MSE for all adapted models on all three datasets. Together, these results identify the complementary information across stations and variables as an important resource for improving station weather forecasting. Our code can be obtained at https://github.com/hnu-vis/M2-Weather.
Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

C-STRIDE: An Observation-Driven AI Digital Twin for Predicting Basin-Wide Flood Fields from Sparse Stream-Gauge Histories

Emergency managers need to know where floodwater is, how deep it is, and how it will change over the coming hours across an entire river basin. During a flood, however, real-time measurements come from only a handful of stream gauges, and high-resolution hydrodynamic models are too costly to rerun each time new data arrive or to run as large ensembles. We present C-STRIDE, an observation-driven AI digital twin that turns short records from a few stream gauges, together with terrain and rainfall, into basin-wide maps of water depth and extends these predictions up to a day ahead. It is trained on simulations from a calibrated two-dimensional hydrodynamic model and needs no separate data-assimilation step. In the Des Plaines River basin near Chicago, six gauges inform predictions over 4.2 million 30-m grid cells. Terrain improves the predictions most, rainfall keeps errors from growing over longer horizons, and together they reduce errors by about 40% compared with gauge records alone. When future rainfall is known, errors remain near 15% one day ahead, compared with nearly 40% without rainfall. Given real instead of simulated gauge records, the model shifts its predictions toward the observed hydrographs at three of six gauges without retraining, and it runs about 150 times faster than the hydrodynamic model. These results show how sparse gauges, terrain, and rainfall can be combined into fast, continuously updated flood predictions, a step toward operational flood digital twins that still requires testing with real-time data and rainfall forecasts.
Sep 30, 2026cs.MM

PrecipJEPA: JEPA-Regularized Future-State Prediction with Motion-Source Rendering for Precipitation Nowcasting

Long-term precipitation nowcasting requires modeling radar-echo evolution while preserving localized high-intensity structures. Recent radar-specific studies motivate location-aware prediction and separating echo displacement from intensity change. However existing encoders learn historical representations mainly from final forecast errors. We propose PrecipJEPA, which couples a structured forecasting path with an auxiliary path that enriches its encoder from observed radar history. In the forecasting path, an online encoder first converts the observations into spatiotemporal tokens. The Task-Driven Future-State Predictor (TFP) combines these tokens with a recent-dynamics summary and spatiotemporal queries to construct future radar states. The Parallel Motion-Source Renderer (PMSR) decodes these states into motion and source-sink fields that transform the latest observation into future frames. During joint training, the History-Masked JEPA (H-JEPA) operates on the auxiliary path to predict masked historical features from visible context, directly supervising the same online encoder from the observed sequence. Experiments on SEVIR and MeteoNet show that PrecipJEPA improves highest-threshold CSI by 118.6% and 35.1%, respectively, over the strongest baselines, while maintaining the highest mean CSI throughout the 3-hour forecast.
Sep 30, 2026cs.RO

FlapKAD: A Simulation Dataset of Coupled Wing Kinematics and Aerodynamic Dynamics for Flapping-Wing Aerial Vehicles

Experimental investigation and modeling of flapping-wing aerial vehicles are limited by the scarcity of large-scale records that temporally align wing kinematics, aerodynamic responses, and flight states. Existing datasets are often limited in scale and affected by measurement noise and temporal misalignment between rapidly varying wing motion and the associated dynamic response, particularly during high-frequency flapping. We introduce FlapKAD, an episode-structured simulation dataset comprising 2,000 rigid-wing flight episodes and 720,152 valid time steps, with bilateral wing kinematics, aerodynamic responses, and flight states recorded synchronously within a common clock. FlapKAD supports a unified bidirectional sequence-prediction benchmark constructed from the same temporally aligned episodes. The forward task predicts future vertical force coefficients and body vertical velocity from histories of realized flap and twist angles, whereas the inverse task reconstructs future flap- and twist-angle trajectories from the corresponding response histories. A benchmark of eight representative time-series architectures across multiple prediction horizons reveals direction- and horizon-dependent model behavior, systematically higher reconstruction errors for twist angle than for flap angle, and no consistent advantage from increased architectural complexity. FlapKAD provides a reproducible dataset and benchmark for studying coupled wing-kinematic, aerodynamic, and flight-state dynamics in flapping-wing aerial vehicles.
Sep 29, 2026cs.LG

An Input-Frugal Deep Learning Framework for Weather-Driven National Crop-Yield Forecasting: A Case Study of Brazilian Soybean

Reliable, timely crop-yield forecasts are essential for market stability and risk management, yet many approaches rely on costly or hard-to-scale inputs. We present a frugal, transferable, and architecture-agnostic deep learning framework that uses routine weather as the only time-varying input plus two lightweight static context inputs (crop year and an agro-environmental label) to capture long-run change and regional heterogeneity, while supporting multiple sequence encoders under identical data requirements. Using a 20-season Brazilian soybean case study (2001/02-2020/21) with leave-one-year-out cross-validation, we benchmark MLP, CNN, LSTM, CNN-LSTM, a Transformer encoder and the Mamba state-space model against linear ridge regression and a five-year moving-average "farmer" baseline. All deep learning variants outperform ridge, and all sequential encoders surpass the non-sequential MLP. The Transformer achieves the best national accuracy (RMSE 149 kg ha^-1; rRMSE 5.3%; R^2 = 0.784), reducing error by 47.6% relative to the farmer baseline. In-season forecasts improve monotonically from early- to late-season issuance, reaching approximately 50% lower error than the baseline at the latest forecast point. Ablations indicate that the agro-environmental label and spatial instance expansion (multiple grid-node weather sequences per municipality-year) contribute positively without increasing input complexity. SHAP diagnostics suggest crop year explains most of the long-run trajectory, whereas within-season weather and agro-environmental context primarily drive interannual deviations, with moisture/cloud and thermal-demand variables dominating. Overall, the framework is straightforward to deploy across other crops and geographic regions and is naturally compatible with operational weather forecasts for routine monitoring.
Sep 29, 2026cs.AI

GRFBrain: Graph-Structured Rectified Flows for EEG Dynamic Modeling

Forecasting time-varying functional connectivity from electroencephalography (EEG) requires modeling both history-dependent trends and structured variability across channels. Conditional flow matching provides a framework for distributional forecasting, yet it remains unclear whether graph-informed source distributions offer practical advantages over isotropic noise and strong deterministic predictors. We introduce a graph-structured residual flow framework that separates conditional mean prediction from stochastic residual transport. A history-only predictor estimates the future connectivity graph, while a graph Gaussian source encodes dependencies derived from past connectivity through a Laplacian-based covariance. A conditional velocity field transports source samples to future graph residuals, with transport time explicitly distinguished from physical EEG time. Our study identifies the conditions and controls needed to distinguish useful residual transport from improvements attributable to deterministic prediction, learned representations, and sampling effects.
Sep 29, 2026cs.LG

NowcastDiT: Diffusion Transformers are Effective Precipitation Nowcasters

Precipitation nowcasting demands accurate short-term forecasts under strong spatiotemporal variability. Diffusion models are well suited to modeling complex precipitation distributions, yet existing approaches often introduce increasingly specialized designs, leaving the capability of a standard diffusion architecture underexplored. We show that a standard Diffusion Transformer already provides a simple and scalable foundation for precipitation nowcasting, with domain-specific requirements accommodated naturally within its design space. Based on this principle, we develop NowcastDiT and instantiate this flexibility through two complementary adaptations: a dynamics-aware noise prior for temporally coherent forecasts, and end-to-end reinforcement learning with timestep-aware rewards for meteorological skill. Experiments on SEVIR and MRMS benchmarks show that NowcastDiT achieves state-of-the-art performance in both perceptual quality and meteorological skill. These results suggest that standard DiT can serve as an effective foundation for precipitation nowcasting.
Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

PyroStack: A Multi-Band Spatio-Temporal Sub-Daily Dataset for Wildfires in the United States

Wildfires are an increasing hazard to ecosystems, air quality, and human systems, creating a growing need for datasets that support systematic development and evaluation of models for predicting fire spread across diverse landscapes. Effective prediction requires integrating meteorological conditions, fuels, vegetation, and topography at spatial and temporal resolutions suitable for both physical simulation and data-driven approaches. However, existing datasets often lack the resolution and coverage needed to capture these interacting controls. The PyroStack dataset addresses this gap by providing a harmonized, event-based collection of wildfire and environmental data across the contiguous United States and Alaska. It integrates satellite-derived fire observations with atmospheric reanalysis, vegetation, fuel characteristics, and topographic information into a unified framework spanning 6994 wildfires that occurred between 2012 and 2024 across a wide range of ecosystems and climate conditions. PyroStack offers spatial resolutions ranging from 30 m to 9 km and hourly temporal resolution, along with fire progression data at 12-hour intervals to support model initialization and evaluation. By combining broad spatial coverage with fine spatial and temporal detail, the dataset enables systematic analysis of wildfire dynamics and supports both physics-based and machine learning approaches, providing a foundation for benchmarking and improving fire spread models, with future extensions aimed at incorporating additional regions and fire suppression data streams to further advance wildfire prediction.
Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

AdaST: Adaptive Coupling for Spatial-Temporal Forecasting

Spatial-temporal (ST) forecasting underpins many real-world systems such as traffic, climate, and energy networks. While existing methods implicitly assume strong spatiotemporal coupling, we observe that real-world ST data exhibits distinct coupling regimes, ranging from temporal-dominated and spatial-dominated to strongly coupled patterns. This mismatch causes current models to suffer from spurious dependencies and degraded performance when one correlation dominates. To overcome this limitation, we aim to dynamically modulate spatial and temporal modeling based on the data's inherent coupling structure. However, three key challenges exist: unknown coupling structure, heterogeneous coupling dynamics, and suboptimal spatial modeling. We propose AdaST, an adaptive ST forecasting framework that tackles these challenges through a decompose-recompose paradigm. AdaST factorizes inputs into components capturing different coupling patterns using heterogeneity-aware experts. Each component is processed by role-aligned modules, and a correlation-informed adaptive recomposer integrates them for final prediction. Extensive experiments confirm that AdaST significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating the necessity of an adaptive approach.
Sep 28, 2026cs.SE

Graph-Based Learning for Multi-Horizon Martian Atmospheric Forecasting

Martian weather forecasting is important for future exploration, but atmospheric behaviour on Mars combines spatial, temporal, vertical, and dust-driven processes in ways that challenge current modelling and forecasting approaches. This paper introduces MaGMA (Martian Graph-based Multi-horizon Atmospheric Forecasting), a graph-based data engineering framework that transforms OpenMARS reanalysis fields into structured learning objects for Martian atmospheric forecasting. Local atmospheric patches are represented as graph nodes and linked through spatial neighbourhoods, temporal continuity, longer temporal dependencies, and dynamically similar atmospheric states. The model integrates recent atmospheric history, engineered physical descriptors, and vertical atmospheric information to support forecasting across multiple horizons. We evaluate MaGMA across five unseen Martian years, including regular years and a global dust storm year. In regular years, the model achieves overall R^2 values of approximately 0.73-0.85. For dust-column forecasting, it outperforms classical and deep temporal baselines in most year-horizon comparisons. During the global dust storm year, dust-column prediction remains strong at shorter horizons, with R^2 above 0.8 for the first two horizons, while broader multivariate performance declines. The results show that graph-based data engineering can create reusable and diagnostically useful representations for planetary atmospheric forecasting, while highlighting the need for better learning under rare extreme regimes and improved use of vertical atmospheric structure.
Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

Addressing Spatial Indistinguishability in Spatiotemporal Prediction via Optimal Transport-Guided Masking

Spatiotemporal prediction aims to learn discriminative representations from correlated temporal signals over spatial structures for accurate future inference. A central challenge is \emph{spatial indistinguishability}: different nodes may share similar historical patterns yet evolve toward divergent futures, severely degrading forecasting performance in real-world sensor networks. Existing embedding-based and graph neural network (GNN)-based approaches can partially detect such ambiguous nodes but rely on historical similarity, struggling to capture \emph{future behavioral divergence}. We propose \textbf{STOT} (\textbf{S}patio\textbf{T}emporal \textbf{O}ptimal \textbf{T}ransport), a self-supervised framework that resolves spatiotemporal ambiguity via structured masking guided by optimal transport. Our key idea treats indistinguishability as a \emph{disambiguation} problem: future states are inferred by exploiting concurrent spatial correlations and their time-varying similarity. We design a similarity-aware metric for dynamic inter-node relationships and an optimal transport-based masking strategy to emphasize ambiguous positions during pre-training. A batch consistency constraint preserves semantic coherence, while a random-walk masking mechanism promotes structured context exploration. Experiments on six real-world datasets show that STOT performs competitively with state-of-the-art baselines on the evaluated benchmarks and improved interpretability through transport-plan visualizations.
Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

SurgGMF: Fully Causal Gaussian Motion Forecasting for Anticipatory Surgical Scene Rendering

Dynamic surgical scene modeling is essential for robotic perception, simulation, and decision support. Although existing neural rendering methods enable efficient reconstruction and rendering of deformable surgical scenes, they remain primarily focused on observed-frame reconstruction rather than forecasting future scene states. To this end, we present SurgGMF, a fully causal Gaussian motion forecasting framework for anticipatory surgical scene rendering. Rather than predicting future RGB images directly, SurgGMF forecasts future Gaussian motion states represented by position, scale, and rotation residuals (X/S/R) from historical Gaussian motion fields. To prevent target leakage, we introduce a full-causal-last rendering protocol, where future Gaussian states are rendered without accessing target-frame Gaussian attributes while preserving causal appearance propagation. We evaluate SurgGMF on 12 EndoNeRF and StereoMIS video slices using neural temporal learners and classical dynamics baselines under a unified forecasting protocol. Learned Gaussian motion forecasting consistently outperforms classical dynamics baselines in render space, demonstrating gains beyond hand-crafted state extrapolation. Latency analysis further reveals an accuracy--efficiency trade-off: under the current implementations, TKAN achieves the highest accuracy, whereas GRU and LSTM provide more favorable module-level latency profiles. These results establish SurgGMF as a reproducible framework for causal Gaussian motion forecasting and advance surgical Gaussian representations from retrospective reconstruction toward predictive scene modeling.
Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

Evaluating Dynamical Fidelity through Predictive Structure in Physical Representations

Machine-learning models for physical systems are currently evaluated primarily through errors between predicted and reference states and, increasingly, through tests of physical consistency. These metrics assess whether predictions are accurate and satisfy selected physical requirements, but provide limited insight into whether learned trajectories reproduce the underlying dynamics. Domain experts examine such relationships through physical representations that expose relevant processes, interactions, and responses, but these analyses are often separated from typical machine-learning evaluation. We introduce a practical framework for evaluating dynamical fidelity through predictive structure in physical representation spaces. Experts define the representations, while reference trajectories determine which relationships are predictive and retained as evaluation tests. We demonstrate the approach in atmospheric forecasting using ERA5 representations of planetary-wave activity and Northern Annular Mode evolution, and evaluate Pangu-Weather, GraphCast, and FengWu. The models exhibit distinct departures from reference predictive structure that are not reflected by conventional forecast errors. The framework thereby turns domain-expert representations into systematic tests of learned physical dynamics without prescribing the relationships in advance.
Sep 27, 2026cs.LG

LTV-CTDNet: Compositional Turning Decomposition for Short-Term Turning-Movement Forecasting

Short-term turning-movement forecasts can support signal control and corridor operations, but unconstrained neural networks may produce physically impossible negative counts or outputs that are not explicitly tied to an approach-demand total. This study introduces the Linear Temporal-Variable Compositional Turning Decomposition Network (LTV-CTDNet), a forecasting framework designed to combine competitive accuracy with structurally admissible outputs. LTV-CTDNet was evaluated using seven months of 15-minute LiDAR observations from eight monitored corridor locations in Nashville, Tennessee. Its lightweight encoder combines recent turning-movement history, weekly time-slot embeddings, and location embeddings. The Compositional Turning Decomposition framework separately predicts nonnegative approach totals and within-approach turning proportions, then reconstructs movement forecasts from these components. Among the evaluated predefined configurations, LTV-CTDNet achieved a movement-level MAE of 1.8189 and RMSE of 3.8072. Its accuracy gains over the strongest sequence models were modest, but it produced no negative forecasts, while unconstrained learned models generated negative values in approximately 10.6% to 29.2% of raw forecast cells. The framework enforces nonnegative outputs and exact agreement between each model-predicted approach total and the sum of its component movements by construction, providing directly interpretable forecasts without clipping or coherence correction.
Sep 27, 2026cs.LG

Diffusion-Based Rollouts as a Stabilization Mechanism for Long-Horizon Environmental Forecasting

Extending forecast lead times while maintaining predictive skill remains a major challenge in environmental forecasting. We investigate diffusion-based rollouts as a stabilization mechanism for recursive forecasting using low-dimensional water-level time series and high-dimensional precipitation fields. Across both modalities, diffusion suppresses recursive error growth, with the largest stabilization occurring where deterministic rollouts are most unstable. However, stabilization does not guarantee forecast fidelity. In the water-level experiments, forecasts progressively lose event-level fidelity as the rollout loses access to external predictive information, and trajectory-level comparisons show that diffusion can remain numerically stable while contracting toward central values and exhibiting reduced variability. In the precipitation experiments, which retain conditioning from numerical weather prediction throughout the rollout, diffusion better preserves spatial organization and event-detection skill. Together, these contrasting experiments indicate that diffusion can control recursive error amplification, while its practical benefit also depends on the predictive information available to constrain future evolution.
Sep 24, 2026cs.LG

Just for FUNS: LLM-Guided Spatio-Temporal Graph Node Generation for Forecasting Unobserved Node States

Spatio-temporal forecasting is a cornerstone of logistics, urban planning, and intelligent transportation systems. However, constrained by deployment costs and maintenance resources, sensor networks often lack comprehensive spatial coverage, rendering Forecast Unobserved Node States (FUNS) a critical yet formidable challenge. Conventional models rely on historical observations and typically falter when encountering nodes without prior records. To address this, we redefine the problem as a conditional generation task on spatio-temporal graphs and propose GenST, a framework that introduces Large Language Models (LLMs) as a semantic bridge, leveraging a pre-trained LLM fine-tuned to extract rich semantic features from node descriptions, such as functional zones and road network structures, to compensate for missing spatio-temporal signals. Specifically, we design a two-stage generative architecture: a Spatio-Temporal VAE first compresses spatio-temporal dynamics into a latent space, followed by a Generative Transformer (GenT) that reconstructs the future states of unobserved nodes from noise, guided by multi-modal conditions including semantics, geographic coordinates, and neighborhood contexts. Experiments on six traffic and two non-traffic datasets show GenST significantly outperforms existing baselines in zero-shot prediction tasks, demonstrating the practical potential of semantic-guided generation for mitigating spatio-temporal data sparsity.