arXiv Machine Learning

Label-Efficient Learning for Ground-Based Sky-Image Classification: A Benchmark of Transfer Learning, Active Learning, and Pseudo-Labeling on GCD

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

SolarBench: A global solar energy nowcasting benchmark

SolarBench is an open global benchmark for image-based solar nowcasting that consolidates over six million sky and satellite images from 11 sites across a decade, paired with irradiance, PV output, and atmospheric data. The benchmark includes a toolbox for reproducible data access, processing, model development, and evaluation. Using SolarBench, the authors benchmark representative models, uncover a gap between average forecasting accuracy and the capture of rapid solar fluctuations, quantify predictability across cloud regimes, and demonstrate data‑efficient adaptation to new PV systems.

By Yuhao Nie, Stephen Campbell, Quentin Paletta, Liwenbo Zhang, Tao Jing, Samer Chaaraoui, Jonathan Giezendanner, Andea Scott, Tao Sun, Cong Feng, Max Aragon, Jacques Camier, Adam Jensen, Florian Kotthoff, Yuexing Yang, Yang Ming, Mengying Li, Stefanie Meilinger, Yupeng Wu, Adam Brandt, Sherrie Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
1d ago

Cryo-Bench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Cryosphere Mapping

Cryo-Bench is a new benchmark that evaluates foundation models for cryosphere mapping, comprising six semantic‑segmentation datasets across five cryospheric components (supraglacial debris, glacial lakes, sea ice, calving fronts, and Antarctic ice‑shelf extent). The benchmark includes multispectral, RGB, and SAR observations from under‑represented regions and tests thirteen geo‑foundation models alongside U‑Net and Vision Transformer baselines. Results show that with frozen encoders U‑Net slightly outperforms TerraMind, but the difference is not statistically significant; fine‑tuning with learning‑rate optimization can dramatically improve performance for some models, while in few‑shot scenarios several foundation models retain over 90 % of their full‑label accuracy.

By Saurabh Kaushik, Lalit Maurya, Beth Tellman, Swalpa Kumar Roy, Valerio Marsocci, Gustau Camps-Valls, Jocelyn Chanussot
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Tabular Deep Learning vs Classical Machine Learning for Urban Land Cover Classification

The paper compares classical machine learning algorithms—such as Logistic Regression, SVM, Random Forest, XGBoost, and CatBoost—with Tabular Deep Learning models (TabNet, FT-Transformer, TabTransformer, TabSeq, and 1D CNNs) for urban land cover classification using a UCI dataset derived from high‑resolution aerial imagery. It evaluates performance across nine land cover classes, addressing challenges like high dimensionality, heterogeneous features, and class imbalance by applying weighted cross‑entropy loss for deep models and measuring accuracy, macro‑precision, macro‑recall, macro‑F1, AUC‑ROC, and confusion matrices. Results indicate that while tree ensembles remain strong baselines, Tabular Deep Learning can match or surpass them when non‑linear interactions are prominent and imbalance handling is effective.

By Muntasir Tabasum, Tanpia Tasnim, Md. Ekramul Islam, Al Zadid Sultan Bin Habib