ChaosBench: A Multi-Channel, Physics-Based Benchmark for Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Climate Prediction Supplementary Material

Neural Information Processing Systems

ChaosBench is published under the open source GNU General Public License. Further development and potential updates discussed in the limitations section will take place on the ChaosBench page. Furthermore, we are committed to maintaining and preserving the ChaosBench benchmark. Ongoing maintenance also includes tracking and resolving issues identified by the broader community after release. User feedback will be closely monitored via the GitHub issue tracker. All assets are hosted on GitHub and HuggingFace, which guarantees reliable and stable storage. Dataset: All our dataset, present and future (e.g., with more years, multi-resolution support, etc) are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ChaosBench.


ChaosBench: A Multi-Channel, Physics-Based Benchmark for Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Climate Prediction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Accurate prediction of climate in the subseasonal-to-seasonal scale is crucial for disaster preparedness and robust decision making amidst climate change. Yet, forecasting beyond the weather timescale is challenging because it deals with problems other than initial condition, including boundary interaction, butterfly effect, and our inherent lack of physical understanding. At present, existing benchmarks tend to have shorter forecasting range of up-to 15 days, do not include a wide range of operational baselines, and lack physics-based constraints for explainability. Thus, we propose ChaosBench, a challenging benchmark to extend the predictability range of data-driven weather emulators to S2S timescale. First, ChaosBench is comprised of variables beyond the typical surface-atmospheric ERA5 to also include ocean, ice, and land reanalysis products that span over 45 years to allow for full Earth system emulation that respects boundary conditions. We also propose physics-based, in addition to deterministic and probabilistic metrics, to ensure a physically-consistent ensemble that accounts for butterfly effect. Furthermore, we evaluate on a diverse set of physics-based forecasts from four national weather agencies as baselines to our data-driven counterpart such as ViT/ClimaX, PanguWeather, GraphCast, and FourCastNetV2. Overall, we find methods originally developed for weather-scale applications fail on S2S task: their performance simply collapse to an unskilled climatology. Nonetheless, we outline and demonstrate several strategies that can extend the predictability range of existing weather emulators, including the use of ensembles, robust control of error propagation, and the use of physics-informed models.


Adversarial Distributional Training for Robust Deep Learning Yinpeng Dong

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Adversarial training (AT) is among the most effective techniques to improve model robustness by augmenting training data with adversarial examples. However, most existing AT methods adopt a specific attack to craft adversarial examples, leading to the unreliable robustness against other unseen attacks. Besides, a single attack algorithm could be insufficient to explore the space of perturbations. In this paper, we introduce adversarial distributional training (ADT), a novel framework for learning robust models. ADT is formulated as a minimax optimization problem, where the inner maximization aims to learn an adversarial distribution to characterize the potential adversarial examples around a natural one under an entropic regularizer, and the outer minimization aims to train robust models by minimizing the expected loss over the worst-case adversarial distributions. Through a theoretical analysis, we develop a general algorithm for solving ADT, and present three approaches for parameterizing the adversarial distributions, ranging from the typical Gaussian distributions to the flexible implicit ones. Empirical results on several benchmarks validate the effectiveness of ADT compared with the state-of-the-art AT methods.


COLD Decoding: Energy-based Constrained Text Generation with Langevin Dynamics Lianhui Qin 1 Sean Welleck 12 Daniel Khashabi 3

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Many applications of text generation require incorporating different constraints to control the semantics or style of generated text. These constraints can be hard (e.g., ensuring certain keywords are included in the output) and soft (e.g., contextualizing the output with the left-or right-hand context).


DiffPO: A causal diffusion model for learning distributions of potential outcomes

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Predicting potential outcomes of interventions from observational data is crucial for decision-making in medicine, but the task is challenging due to the fundamental problem of causal inference. Existing methods are largely limited to point estimates of potential outcomes with no uncertain quantification; thus, the full information about the distributions of potential outcomes is typically ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel causal diffusion model called DiffPO, which is carefully designed for reliable inferences in medicine by learning the distribution of potential outcomes. In our DiffPO, we leverage a tailored conditional denoising diffusion model to learn complex distributions, where we address the selection bias through a novel orthogonal diffusion loss. Another strength of our DiffPO method is that it is highly flexible (e.g., it can also be used to estimate different causal quantities such as CATE). Across a wide range of experiments, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.


From Finite to Countable-Armed Bandits

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We consider a stochastic bandit problem with countably many arms that belong to a finite set of types, each characterized by a unique mean reward. In addition, there is a fixed distribution over types which sets the proportion of each type in the population of arms. The decision maker is oblivious to the type of any arm and to the aforementioned distribution over types, but perfectly knows the total number of types occurring in the population of arms. We propose a fully adaptive online learning algorithm that achieves O (log n) distribution-dependent expected cumulative regret after any number of plays n, and show that this order of regret is best possible. The analysis of our algorithm relies on newly discovered concentration and convergence properties of optimism-based policies like UCB in finite-armed bandit problems with zero gap, which may be of independent interest.


A Simple Remedy for Dataset Bias via Self-Influence: A Mislabeled Sample Perspective Yeonsung Jung *1, June Yong Yang 1

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Learning generalized models from biased data is an important undertaking toward fairness in deep learning. To address this issue, recent studies attempt to identify and leverage bias-conflicting samples free from spurious correlations without prior knowledge of bias or an unbiased set. However, spurious correlation remains an ongoing challenge, primarily due to the difficulty in precisely detecting these samples. In this paper, inspired by the similarities between mislabeled samples and bias-conflicting samples, we approach this challenge from a novel perspective of mislabeled sample detection. Specifically, we delve into Influence Function, one of the standard methods for mislabeled sample detection, for identifying bias-conflicting samples and propose a simple yet effective remedy for biased models by leveraging them. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments on diverse datasets, we demonstrate that our new perspective can boost the precision of detection and rectify biased models effectively. Furthermore, our approach is complementary to existing methods, showing performance improvement even when applied to models that have already undergone recent debiasing techniques.


A Proofs

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As mentioned in sections 3 and 4, our dataset D contains the random perturbation vectors ฮพ and side information ฯˆ. B.1 Loss function Mathematically, the conditional total variation loss function (11) can be explicitly written as: (ฯˆ They are trained to learn lower dimension data representations at the bottleneck of the network. They have the capability to learn representations in a fully unsupervised way which makes them suitable for the task at hand. The decoder is a mirrored version of the encoder. The input layer is fully connected to the output layers with an intermediate ReLU activation layer in both the encoder and the decoder.


Optimal-state Dynamics Estimation for Physics-based Human Motion Capture from Videos

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Human motion capture from monocular videos has made significant progress in recent years. However, modern approaches often produce temporal artifacts, e.g. in form of jittery motion and struggle to achieve smooth and physically plausible motions. Explicitly integrating physics, in form of internal forces and exterior torques, helps alleviating these artifacts. Current state-of-the-art approaches make use of an automatic PD controller to predict torques and reaction forces in order to re-simulate the input kinematics, i.e. the joint angles of a predefined skeleton. However, due to imperfect physical models, these methods often require simplifying assumptions and extensive preprocessing of the input kinematics to achieve good performance.


DASH: Warm-Starting Neural Network Training in Stationary Settings without Loss of Plasticity

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Warm-starting neural network training by initializing networks with previously learned weights is appealing, as practical neural networks are often deployed under a continuous influx of new data. However, it often leads to loss of plasticity, where the network loses its ability to learn new information, resulting in worse generalization than training from scratch. This occurs even under stationary data distributions, and its underlying mechanism is poorly understood. We develop a framework emulating real-world neural network training and identify noise memorization as the primary cause of plasticity loss when warm-starting on stationary data. Motivated by this, we propose Direction-Aware SHrinking (DASH), a method aiming to mitigate plasticity loss by selectively forgetting memorized noise while preserving learned features.