arXiv subjects

Daniela Szwarcman

Publications and source records attributed to Daniela Szwarcman.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SomBench: Benchmark Dataset for Advancing Machine Learning in Lunar Science

Lunar orbital missions, such as Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Kaguya/SELENE, Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, and Lunar Prospector, among others, provide rich multi-instrument observations, but their heterogeneity in sampling, projection, and conventions limits reproducible machine learning (ML). We introduce SomBench, a unified, spatially-aligned, ML-ready lunar dataset aggregating 30+ co-registered layers from ten instruments across four missions, spanning 1 meter to 20 kilometer/pixel and covering 82 degree latitude in 90 Lunar Transverse Mercator zones with two polar stereographic caps. An image-anchored tiling pipeline yields pretraining-ready multimodal tile views with leakage-safe splits, distributed as netCDF with Parquet catalogs. An application benchmark suite spans impact processes, volcanic history, and polar volatiles. Baseline experiments with ResNet-50 and SwinV2-B models confirm that each benchmark task is learnable from the released inputs, establishing reference points for future model development.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Multimodal-Multiresolution Foundation Model for Lunar Remote Sensing

We present a multimodal foundation model for lunar remote sensing, pretrained from scratch on SomBench, a geographically partitioned corpus of nearly two million co-registered tile bundles spanning 11 modalities at two spatial scales (1 m/pixel and 100 m/pixel). The model adapts the TerraMind masked-token architecture with two lunar-specific extensions: acquisition geometry is provided as explicit context, and meter- and hundred-meter-scale tiles are trained jointly so that a single set of weights covers both resolutions. FlexiViT patch embeddings allow adaptation to different patch sizes without retraining, while modality-wise inputs enable flexible multimodal fine-tuning. Qualitative generation experiments suggest the model learns meaningful cross-modal correspondences, including terrain derivatives from elevation and illumination-consistent reflectance from geometry. We evaluate on four benchmarks: crater detection at WAC and NAC scales, irregular mare patch (IMP) segmentation, and polar ice prospectivity regression. Across tasks, the pretrained model matches or outperforms ImageNet-pretrained baselines and an architecturally identical random-init control. On multimodal ice prospectivity regression, pretrained variants achieve the best results, while the random-init model outperforms most baselines, suggesting gains arise from both the architecture and pretraining. Label efficiency is notable for WAC crater detection, where the pretrained model trained on 50% of the data exceeds the strongest ImageNet baseline trained on the full dataset. Among adaptation strategies, LoRA matches or surpasses full fine-tuning on crater detection and IMP segmentation while using far fewer trainable parameters, whereas full fine-tuning performs best for ice prospectivity regression. We release the pretrained checkpoint, benchmark datasets, and fine-tuning code to support reproducible lunar AI research.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Prithvi-EO-2.0: A Versatile Multi-Temporal Foundation Model for Earth Observation Applications

This paper presents Prithvi-EO-2.0, a new geospatial foundation model that offers significant improvements over its predecessor, Prithvi-EO-1.0. Trained on 4.2 million global time series samples from NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 data archive at 30-m resolution, the new model incorporates temporal and location embeddings for enhanced performance across various geospatial tasks. Through extensive benchmarking with GEO-Bench, the model outperforms the previous Prithvi-EO model by 8% across a range of tasks. It also outperforms six other geospatial foundation models when benchmarked on remote sensing tasks from different domains and resolutions (i.e. from 0.1 m to 15 m). The results demonstrate the versatility of the model in both classical Earth observation and high-resolution applications. Early involvement of end-users and subject matter experts (SMEs) allowed constant feedback on model and dataset design, enabling customization across diverse SME-led applications in disaster response, land cover and crop mapping, and ecosystem dynamics monitoring. Prithvi-EO-2.0 is available as an open-source model on Hugging Face and IBM TerraTorch, with additional resources on GitHub. The project exemplifies the Trusted Open Science approach embraced by all involved organizations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

TerraTorch: The Geospatial Foundation Models Toolkit

TerraTorch is a fine-tuning and benchmarking toolkit for Geospatial Foundation Models built on PyTorch Lightning and tailored for satellite, weather, and climate data. It integrates domain-specific data modules, pre-defined tasks, and a modular model factory that pairs any backbone with diverse decoder heads. These components allow researchers and practitioners to fine-tune supported models in a no-code fashion by simply editing a training configuration. By consolidating best practices for model development and incorporating the automated hyperparameter optimization extension Iterate, TerraTorch reduces the expertise and time required to fine-tune or benchmark models on new Earth Observation use cases. Furthermore, TerraTorch directly integrates with GEO-Bench, allowing for systematic and reproducible benchmarking of Geospatial Foundation Models. TerraTorch is open sourced under Apache 2.0, available at https://github.com/IBM/terratorch, and can be installed via pip install terratorch.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Prithvi WxC: Foundation Model for Weather and Climate

Triggered by the realization that AI emulators can rival the performance of traditional numerical weather prediction models running on HPC systems, there is now an increasing number of large AI models that address use cases such as forecasting, downscaling, or nowcasting. While the parallel developments in the AI literature focus on foundation models -- models that can be effectively tuned to address multiple, different use cases -- the developments on the weather and climate side largely focus on single-use cases with particular emphasis on mid-range forecasting. We close this gap by introducing Prithvi WxC, a 2.3 billion parameter foundation model developed using 160 variables from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). Prithvi WxC employs an encoder-decoder-based architecture, incorporating concepts from various recent transformer models to effectively capture both regional and global dependencies in the input data. The model has been designed to accommodate large token counts to model weather phenomena in different topologies at fine resolutions. Furthermore, it is trained with a mixed objective that combines the paradigms of masked reconstruction with forecasting. We test the model on a set of challenging downstream tasks namely: Autoregressive rollout forecasting, Downscaling, Gravity wave flux parameterization, and Extreme events estimation. The pretrained model with 2.3 billion parameters, along with the associated fine-tuning workflows, has been publicly released as an open-source contribution via Hugging Face.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Evaluating the transferability potential of deep learning models for climate downscaling

Climate downscaling, the process of generating high-resolution climate data from low-resolution simulations, is essential for understanding and adapting to climate change at regional and local scales. Deep learning approaches have proven useful in tackling this problem. However, existing studies usually focus on training models for one specific task, location and variable, which are therefore limited in their generalizability and transferability. In this paper, we evaluate the efficacy of training deep learning downscaling models on multiple diverse climate datasets to learn more robust and transferable representations. We evaluate the effectiveness of architectures zero-shot transferability using CNNs, Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs), and vision Transformers (ViTs). We assess the spatial, variable, and product transferability of downscaling models experimentally, to understand the generalizability of these different architecture types.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Fine-tuning of Geospatial Foundation Models for Aboveground Biomass Estimation

Global vegetation structure mapping is critical for understanding the global carbon cycle and maximizing the efficacy of nature-based carbon sequestration initiatives. Moreover, vegetation structure mapping can help reduce the impacts of climate change by, for example, guiding actions to improve water security, increase biodiversity and reduce flood risk. Global satellite measurements provide an important set of observations for monitoring and managing deforestation and degradation of existing forests, natural forest regeneration, reforestation, biodiversity restoration, and the implementation of sustainable agricultural practices. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of fine-tuning of a geospatial foundation model to estimate above-ground biomass (AGB) using space-borne data collected across different eco-regions in Brazil. The fine-tuned model architecture consisted of a Swin-B transformer as the encoder (i.e., backbone) and a single convolutional layer for the decoder head. All results were compared to a U-Net which was trained as the baseline model Experimental results of this sparse-label prediction task demonstrate that the fine-tuned geospatial foundation model with a frozen encoder has comparable performance to a U-Net trained from scratch. This is despite the fine-tuned model having 13 times less parameters requiring optimization, which saves both time and compute resources. Further, we explore the transfer-learning capabilities of the geospatial foundation models by fine-tuning on satellite imagery with sparse labels from different eco-regions in Brazil.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Hard-Constrained Deep Learning for Climate Downscaling

The availability of reliable, high-resolution climate and weather data is important to inform long-term decisions on climate adaptation and mitigation and to guide rapid responses to extreme events. Forecasting models are limited by computational costs and, therefore, often generate coarse-resolution predictions. Statistical downscaling, including super-resolution methods from deep learning, can provide an efficient method of upsampling low-resolution data. However, despite achieving visually compelling results in some cases, such models frequently violate conservation laws when predicting physical variables. In order to conserve physical quantities, here we introduce methods that guarantee statistical constraints are satisfied by a deep learning downscaling model, while also improving their performance according to traditional metrics. We compare different constraining approaches and demonstrate their applicability across different neural architectures as well as a variety of climate and weather data sets. Besides enabling faster and more accurate climate predictions through downscaling, we also show that our novel methodologies can improve super-resolution for satellite data and natural images data sets.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2023

A 3D super-resolution of wind fields via physics-informed pixel-wise self-attention generative adversarial network

To mitigate global warming, greenhouse gas sources need to be resolved at a high spatial resolution and monitored in time to ensure the reduction and ultimately elimination of the pollution source. However, the complexity of computation in resolving high-resolution wind fields left the simulations impractical to test different time lengths and model configurations. This study presents a preliminary development of a physics-informed super-resolution (SR) generative adversarial network (GAN) that super-resolves the three-dimensional (3D) low-resolution wind fields by upscaling x9 times. We develop a pixel-wise self-attention (PWA) module that learns 3D weather dynamics via a self-attention computation followed by a 2D convolution. We also employ a loss term that regularizes the self-attention map during pretraining, capturing the vertical convection process from input wind data. The new PWA SR-GAN shows the high-fidelity super-resolved 3D wind data, learns a wind structure at the high-frequency domain, and reduces the computational cost of a high-resolution wind simulation by x89.7 times.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2023

Foundation Models for Generalist Geospatial Artificial Intelligence

Significant progress in the development of highly adaptable and reusable Artificial Intelligence (AI) models is expected to have a significant impact on Earth science and remote sensing. Foundation models are pre-trained on large unlabeled datasets through self-supervision, and then fine-tuned for various downstream tasks with small labeled datasets. This paper introduces a first-of-a-kind framework for the efficient pre-training and fine-tuning of foundational models on extensive geospatial data. We have utilized this framework to create Prithvi, a transformer-based geospatial foundational model pre-trained on more than 1TB of multispectral satellite imagery from the Harmonized Landsat-Sentinel 2 (HLS) dataset. Our study demonstrates the efficacy of our framework in successfully fine-tuning Prithvi to a range of Earth observation tasks that have not been tackled by previous work on foundation models involving multi-temporal cloud gap imputation, flood mapping, wildfire scar segmentation, and multi-temporal crop segmentation. Our experiments show that the pre-trained model accelerates the fine-tuning process compared to leveraging randomly initialized weights. In addition, pre-trained Prithvi compares well against the state-of-the-art, e.g., outperforming a conditional GAN model in multi-temporal cloud imputation by up to 5pp (or 5.7%) in the structural similarity index. Finally, due to the limited availability of labeled data in the field of Earth observation, we gradually reduce the quantity of available labeled data for refining the model to evaluate data efficiency and demonstrate that data can be decreased significantly without affecting the model's accuracy. The pre-trained 100 million parameter model and corresponding fine-tuning workflows have been released publicly as open source contributions to the global Earth sciences community through Hugging Face.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Fourier Neural Operators for Arbitrary Resolution Climate Data Downscaling

Climate simulations are essential in guiding our understanding of climate change and responding to its effects. However, it is computationally expensive to resolve complex climate processes at high spatial resolution. As one way to speed up climate simulations, neural networks have been used to downscale climate variables from fast-running low-resolution simulations, but high-resolution training data are often unobtainable or scarce, greatly limiting accuracy. In this work, we propose a downscaling method based on the Fourier neural operator. It trains with data of a small upsampling factor and then can zero-shot downscale its input to arbitrary unseen high resolution. Evaluated both on ERA5 climate model data and on the Navier-Stokes equation solution data, our downscaling model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art convolutional and generative adversarial downscaling models, both in standard single-resolution downscaling and in zero-shot generalization to higher upsampling factors. Furthermore, we show that our method also outperforms state-of-the-art data-driven partial differential equation solvers on Navier-Stokes equations. Overall, our work bridges the gap between simulation of a physical process and interpolation of low-resolution output, showing that it is possible to combine both approaches and significantly improve upon each other.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Extreme Precipitation Seasonal Forecast Using a Transformer Neural Network

An impact of climate change is the increase in frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events. However, confidently predicting the likelihood of extreme precipitation at seasonal scales remains an outstanding challenge. Here, we present an approach to forecasting the quantiles of the maximum daily precipitation in each week up to six months ahead using the temporal fusion transformer (TFT) model. Through experiments in two regions, we compare TFT predictions with those of two baselines: climatology and a calibrated ECMWF SEAS5 ensemble forecast (S5). Our results show that, in terms of quantile risk at six month lead time, the TFT predictions significantly outperform those from S5 and show an overall small improvement compared to climatology. The TFT also responds positively to departures from normal that climatology cannot.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

A modular framework for extreme weather generation

Extreme weather events have an enormous impact on society and are expected to become more frequent and severe with climate change. In this context, resilience planning becomes crucial for risk mitigation and coping with these extreme events. Machine learning techniques can play a critical role in resilience planning through the generation of realistic extreme weather event scenarios that can be used to evaluate possible mitigation actions. This paper proposes a modular framework that relies on interchangeable components to produce extreme weather event scenarios. We discuss possible alternatives for each of the components and show initial results comparing two approaches on the task of generating precipitation scenarios.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Semantic Segmentation of Seismic Images

Almost all work to understand Earth's subsurface on a large scale relies on the interpretation of seismic surveys by experts who segment the survey (usually a cube) into layers; a process that is very time demanding. In this paper, we present a new deep neural network architecture specially designed to semantically segment seismic images with a minimal amount of training data. To achieve this, we make use of a transposed residual unit that replaces the traditional dilated convolution for the decode block. Also, instead of using a predefined shape for up-scaling, our network learns all the steps to upscale the features from the encoder. We train our neural network using the Penobscot 3D dataset; a real seismic dataset acquired offshore Nova Scotia, Canada. We compare our approach with two well-known deep neural network topologies: Fully Convolutional Network and U-Net. In our experiments, we show that our approach can achieve more than 99 percent of the mean intersection over union (mIOU) metric, outperforming the existing topologies. Moreover, our qualitative results show that the obtained model can produce masks very close to human interpretation with very little discontinuity.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2019

Netherlands Dataset: A New Public Dataset for Machine Learning in Seismic Interpretation

Machine learning and, more specifically, deep learning algorithms have seen remarkable growth in their popularity and usefulness in the last years. This is arguably due to three main factors: powerful computers, new techniques to train deeper networks and larger datasets. Although the first two are readily available in modern computers and ML libraries, the last one remains a challenge for many domains. It is a fact that big data is a reality in almost all fields nowadays, and geosciences are not an exception. However, to achieve the success of general-purpose applications such as ImageNet - for which there are +14 million labeled images for 1000 target classes - we not only need more data, we need more high-quality labeled data. When it comes to the Oil&Gas industry, confidentiality issues hamper even more the sharing of datasets. In this work, we present the Netherlands interpretation dataset, a contribution to the development of machine learning in seismic interpretation. The Netherlands F3 dataset acquisition was carried out in the North Sea, Netherlands offshore. The data is publicly available and contains pos-stack data, 8 horizons and well logs of 4 wells. For the purposes of our machine learning tasks, the original dataset was reinterpreted, generating 9 horizons separating different seismic facies intervals. The interpreted horizons were used to generate approximatelly 190,000 labeled images for inlines and crosslines. Finally, we present two deep learning applications in which the proposed dataset was employed and produced compelling results.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Penobscot Dataset: Fostering Machine Learning Development for Seismic Interpretation

We have seen in the past years the flourishing of machine and deep learning algorithms in several applications such as image classification and segmentation, object detection and recognition, among many others. This was only possible, in part, because datasets like ImageNet -- with +14 million labeled images -- were created and made publicly available, providing researches with a common ground to compare their advances and extend the state-of-the-art. Although we have seen an increasing interest in machine learning in geosciences as well, we will only be able to achieve a significant impact in our community if we collaborate to build such a common basis. This is even more difficult when it comes to the Oil&Gas industry, in which confidentiality and commercial interests often hinder the sharing of datasets with others. In this letter, we present the Penobscot interpretation dataset, our contribution to the development of machine learning in geosciences, more specifically in seismic interpretation. The Penobscot 3D seismic dataset was acquired in the Scotian shelf, offshore Nova Scotia, Canada. The data is publicly available and comprises pre- and pos-stack data, 5 horizons and well logs of 2 wells. However, for the dataset to be of practical use for our tasks, we had to reinterpret the seismic, generating 7 horizons separating different seismic facies intervals. The interpreted horizons were used to generated +100,000 labeled images for inlines and crosslines. To demonstrate the utility of our dataset, results of two experiments are presented.

physics.geo-ph↗