arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Desertification Forecasting in Semi-Arid Regions: Using Deep Learning to Probe the Observability Limits of Land Degradation Dynamics

The study trains a convolutional LSTM on ten annual Earth Observation variables to forecast desertification dynamics in Ceará, Brazil, achieving modest improvements over persistence and capturing 53‑69% of the regional degradation trend. While the model slightly outperforms simple baselines one to four years ahead, it explains only a small fraction of cell‑level variance, indicating that EO data are more reliable for regional trends than for individual pixel predictions. The authors also demonstrate that elevation and EVI channels degrade forecast skill, and use Monte Carlo dropout to quantify uncertainty in future degradation maps.

By Filipe Moura Da Silva, Cl\'aubio Landney Lima Bandeira
arXiv AI
Sep 16

Schema-Adaptive Action-Conditioned JEPA for Cross-Machine CNC Transfer under Partial Sensor Overlap

The paper introduces a schema‑adaptive action‑conditioned Joint‑Embedding Predictive Architecture (SAAC‑JEPA) for cross‑machine CNC transfer when only a subset of sensors overlap between source and target machines. Experiments show that pretraining does not improve source‑only forecasting, but a carefully selected action‑conditioned JEPA model achieves a zero‑shot RMSE of 0.546 on the target, outperforming persistence but falling short of certain baseline models. Ablation studies reveal that adding RevIN improves RMSE but harms calibration, and limited post‑lock adaptation can further reduce error.

By Ayoub Louaye Bouaziz, Matthieu Ostertag, Anton Demasles