Machine learning methods for satellite data have a range of societally relevant applications, but labels used to train models can be difficult or impossible to acquire. Self-supervision is a natural solution in settings with limited labeled data, but current self-supervised models for satellite data fail to take advantage of the characteristics of that data, including the temporal dimension (which is critical for many applications, such as monitoring crop growth) and availability of data from many complementary sensors (which can significantly improve a model's predictive performance). We present Presto (the Pretrained Remote Sensing Transformer), a model pre-trained on remote sensing pixel-timeseries data. By designing Presto specifically for remote sensing data, we can create a significantly smaller but performant model. Presto excels at a wide variety of globally distributed remote sensing tasks and performs competitively with much larger models while requiring far less compute. Presto can be used for transfer learning or as a feature extractor for simple models, enabling efficient deployment at scale.

Recognizing visual entities in a natural language sentence and arranging them in a 2D spatial layout require a compositional understanding of language and space. This task of layout prediction is valuable in text-to-image synthesis as it allows localized and controlled in-painting of the image. In this comparative study it is shown that we can predict layouts from language representations that implicitly or explicitly encode sentence syntax, if the sentences mention similar entity-relationships to the ones seen during training. To test compositional understanding, we collect a test set of grammatically correct sentences and layouts describing compositions of entities and relations that unlikely have been seen during training. Performance on this test set substantially drops, showing that current models rely on correlations in the training data and have difficulties in understanding the structure of the input sentences. We propose a novel structural loss function that better enforces the syntactic structure of the input sentence and show large performance gains in the task of 2D spatial layout prediction conditioned on text. The loss has the potential to be used in other generation tasks where a tree-like structure underlies the conditioning modality. Code, trained models and the USCOCO evaluation set will be made available via github.

Leveraging contextual knowledge has become standard practice in automated claim verification, yet the impact of temporal reasoning has been largely overlooked. Our study demonstrates that time positively influences the claim verification process of evidence-based fact-checking. The temporal aspects and relations between claims and evidence are first established through grounding on shared timelines, which are constructed using publication dates and time expressions extracted from their text. Temporal information is then provided to RNN-based and Transformer-based classifiers before or after claim and evidence encoding. Our time-aware fact-checking models surpass base models by up to 9% Micro F1 (64.17%) and 15% Macro F1 (47.43%) on the MultiFC dataset. They also outperform prior methods that explicitly model temporal relations between evidence. Our findings show that the presence of temporal information and the manner in which timelines are constructed greatly influence how fact-checking models determine the relevance and supporting or refuting character of evidence documents.