aef
AlphaEarth Foundations: An embedding field model for accurate and efficient global mapping from sparse label data
Brown, Christopher F., Kazmierski, Michal R., Pasquarella, Valerie J., Rucklidge, William J., Samsikova, Masha, Zhang, Chenhui, Shelhamer, Evan, Lahera, Estefania, Wiles, Olivia, Ilyushchenko, Simon, Gorelick, Noel, Zhang, Lihui Lydia, Alj, Sophia, Schechter, Emily, Askay, Sean, Guinan, Oliver, Moore, Rebecca, Boukouvalas, Alexis, Kohli, Pushmeet
Unprecedented volumes of Earth observation data are continually collected around the world, but high-quality labels remain scarce given the effort required to make physical measurements and observations. This has led to considerable investment in bespoke modeling efforts translating sparse labels into maps. Here we introduce AlphaEarth Foundations, an embedding field model yielding a highly general, geospatial representation that assimilates spatial, temporal, and measurement contexts across multiple sources, enabling accurate and efficient production of maps and monitoring systems from local to global scales. The embeddings generated by AlphaEarth Foundations are the only to consistently outperform a suite of other well-known/widely accepted featurization approaches tested on a diverse set of mapping evaluations without re-training. We have released a dataset of global, annual, analysis-ready embedding field layers from 2017 through 2024.
Scalable Geospatial Data Generation Using AlphaEarth Foundations Model
Houriez, Luc, Pilarski, Sebastian, Vahedi, Behzad, Ahmadalipour, Ali, Scully, Teo Honda, Aflitto, Nicholas, Andre, David, Jaffe, Caroline, Wedner, Martha, Mazzola, Rich, Jeffery, Josh, Messinger, Ben, McGinley-Smith, Sage, Russell, Sarah
High-quality labeled geospatial datasets are essential for extracting insights and understanding our planet. Unfortunately, these datasets often do not span the entire globe and are limited to certain geographic regions where data was collected. Google DeepMind's recently released AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) provides an information-dense global geospatial representation designed to serve as a useful input across a wide gamut of tasks. In this article we propose and evaluate a methodology which leverages AEF to extend geospatial labeled datasets beyond their initial geographic regions. We show that even basic models like random forests or logistic regression can be used to accomplish this task. We investigate a case study of extending LANDFIRE's Existing Vegetation Type (EVT) dataset beyond the USA into Canada at two levels of granularity: EvtPhys (13 classes) and EvtGp (80 classes). Qualitatively, for EvtPhys, model predictions align with ground truth. Trained models achieve 81% and 73% classification accuracy on EvtPhys validation sets in the USA and Canada, despite discussed limitations.
Deterministic training of generative autoencoders using invertible layers
Silvestri, Gianluigi, Roos, Daan, Ambrogioni, Luca
In this work, we provide a deterministic alternative to the stochastic variational training of generative autoencoders. We refer to these new generative autoencoders as AutoEncoders within Flows (AEF), since the encoder and decoder are defined as affine layers of an overall invertible architecture. This results in a deterministic encoding of the data, as opposed to the stochastic encoding of VAEs. The paper introduces two related families of AEFs. The first family relies on a partition of the ambient space and is trained by exact maximum-likelihood. The second family exploits a deterministic expansion of the ambient space and is trained by maximizing the log-probability in this extended space. This latter case leaves complete freedom in the choice of encoder, decoder and prior architectures, making it a drop-in replacement for the training of existing VAEs and VAE-style models. We show that these AEFs can have strikingly higher performance than architecturally identical VAEs in terms of log-likelihood and sample quality, especially for low dimensional latent spaces. Importantly, we show that AEF samples are substantially sharper than VAE samples.
Stimulation of soy seeds using environmentally friendly magnetic and electric fields
Dziwulska-Hunek, Agata, Niemczynowicz, Agnieszka, Kycia, Radosław A., Matwijczuk, Arkadiusz, Kornarzyński, Krzysztof, Stadnik, Joanna, Szymanek, Mariusz
The study analyzes the impact of constant and alternating magnetic fields and alternating electric fields on various growth parameters of soy plants: the germination energy and capacity, plants emergence and number, the Yield(II) of the fresh mass of seedlings, protein content, and photosynthetic parameters. Four cultivars were used: MAVKA, MERLIN, VIOLETTA, and ANUSZKA. Moreover, the advanced Machine Learning processing pipeline was proposed to distinguish the impact of physical factors on photosynthetic parameters. It is possible to distinguish exposition on different physical factors for the first three cultivars; therefore, it indicates that the EM factors have some observable effect on soy plants. Moreover, some influence of physical factors on growth parameters was observed. The use of ELM (Electromagnetic) fields had a positive impact on the germination rate in Merlin plants. The highest values were recorded for the constant magnetic field (CMF) - Merlin, and the lowest for the alternating electric field (AEF) - Violetta. An increase in terms of emergence and number of plants after seed stimulation was observed for the Mavka cultivar, except for the AEF treatment (number of plants after 30 days) (...)
AutoEncoder Inspired Unsupervised Feature Selection
Han, Kai, Wang, Yunhe, Zhang, Chao, Li, Chao, Xu, Chao
ABSTRACT High-dimensional data in many areas such as computer vision and machine learning tasks brings in computational and analytical difficulty. Feature selection which selects a subset from observed features is a widely used approach for improving performance and effectiveness of machine learning models with high-dimensional data. In this paper, we propose a novel AutoEncoder Feature Selector (AEFS) for unsupervised feature selection which combines autoencoder regression and group lasso tasks. Compared to traditional feature selection methods, AEFS can select the most important features by excavating both linear and nonlinear information among features, which is more flexible than the conventional self-representation method for unsupervised feature selection with only linear assumptions. Experimental results on benchmark dataset show that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art method.