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Rupasree Dey

Publications and source records attributed to Rupasree Dey.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

cs.LG

Knowledge-Guided Masked Autoencoder with Linear Spectral Mixing and Spectral-Angle-Aware Reconstruction

Integrating domain knowledge into deep learning has emerged as a promising direction for improving model interpretability, generalization, and data efficiency. In this work, we present a novel knowledge-guided ViT-based Masked Autoencoder that embeds scientific domain knowledge within the self-supervised reconstruction process. Instead of relying solely on data-driven optimization, our proposed approach incorporates the Linear Spectral Mixing Model (LSMM) as a physical constraint and physically-based Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM), ensuring that learned representations adhere to known structural relationships between observed signals and their latent components. The framework jointly optimizes LSMM and SAM loss with a conventional Huber loss objective, promoting both numerical accuracy and geometric consistency in the feature space. This knowledge-guided design enhances reconstruction fidelity, stabilizes training under limited supervision, and yields interpretable latent representations grounded in physical principles. The experimental findings indicate that the proposed model substantially enhances reconstruction quality and improves downstream task performance, highlighting the promise of embedding physics-informed inductive biases within transformer-based self-supervised learning.

cs.LG

DeepSalt: Bridging Laboratory and Satellite Spectra through Domain Adaptation and Knowledge Distillation for Large-Scale Soil Salinity Estimation

Soil salinization poses a significant threat to both ecosystems and agriculture because it limits plants' ability to absorb water and, in doing so, reduces crop productivity. This phenomenon alters the soil's spectral properties, creating a measurable relationship between salinity and light reflectance that enables remote monitoring. While laboratory spectroscopy provides precise measurements, its reliance on in-situ sampling limits scalability to regional or global levels. Conversely, hyperspectral satellite imagery enables wide-area observation but lacks the fine-grained interpretability of laboratory instruments. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepSalt, a deep-learning-based spectral transfer framework that leverages knowledge distillation and a novel Spectral Adaptation Unit to transfer high-resolution spectral insights from laboratory-based spectroscopy to satellite-based hyperspectral sensing. Our approach eliminates the need for extensive ground sampling while enabling accurate, large-scale salinity estimation, as demonstrated through comprehensive empirical benchmarks. DeepSalt achieves significant performance gains over methods without explicit domain adaptation, underscoring the impact of the proposed Spectral Adaptation Unit and the knowledge distillation strategy. The model also effectively generalized to unseen geographic regions, explaining a substantial portion of the salinity variance.

cs.CV