Estimating associations between spatial covariates and responses -- rather than merely predicting responses -- is central to environmental science, epidemiology, and economics. For instance, public health officials might be interested in whether air pollution has a strictly positive association with a health outcome, and the magnitude of any effect. Standard machine learning methods often provide accurate predictions but offer limited insight into covariate-response relationships. And we show that existing methods for constructing confidence (or credible) intervals for associations can fail to provide nominal coverage in the face of model misspecification and nonrandom locations -- despite both being essentially always present in spatial problems. We introduce a method that constructs valid frequentist confidence intervals for associations in spatial settings. Our method requires minimal assumptions beyond a form of spatial smoothness and a homoskedastic Gaussian error assumption. In particular, we do not require model correctness or covariate overlap between training and target locations. Our approach is the first to guarantee nominal coverage in this setting and outperforms existing techniques in both real and simulated experiments. Our confidence intervals are valid in finite samples when the noise of the Gaussian error is known, and we provide an asymptotically consistent estimation procedure for this noise variance when it is unknown.

Accurate sensor placement is critical for modeling spatio-temporal systems such as environmental and climate processes. Neural Processes (NPs), particularly Convolutional Conditional Neural Processes (ConvCNPs), provide scalable probabilistic models with uncertainty estimates, making them well-suited for data-driven sensor placement. However, existing approaches rely on total predictive uncertainty, which conflates epistemic and aleatoric components, that may lead to suboptimal sensor selection in ambiguous regions. To address this, we propose expected reduction in epistemic uncertainty as a new acquisition function for sensor placement. To enable this, we extend ConvCNPs with a Mixture Density Networks (MDNs) output head for epistemic uncertainty estimation. Preliminary results suggest that epistemic uncertainty driven sensor placement more effectively reduces model error than approaches based on overall uncertainty.

Searches are conducted to find missing persons and/or objects given uncertain information, imperfect observers and large search areas in Search and Rescue (SAR). In many scenarios, such as Maritime SAR, expected survival times are short and optimal search could increase the likelihood of success. This optimization problem is complex for nontrivial problems given its probabilistic nature. Stochastic optimization methods search large problems by nondeterministically sampling the space to reduce the effective size of the problem. This has been used in SAR planning to search otherwise intractably large problems but the stochastic nature provides no formal guarantees on the quality of solutions found in finite time. This paper instead presents $\rm{A}^{\rm{SAR}}$, an $\varepsilon$-optimal search algorithm for SAR planning. It calculates a heuristic to bound the search space and uses graph-search methods to find solutions that are formally guaranteed to be within a user-specified factor, $\varepsilon$, of the optimal solution. It finds better solutions faster than existing optimization approaches in operational simulations. It is also demonstrated with a real-world field trial on Lake Ontario, Canada, where it was used to locate a drifting manikin in only 150s.

Zero-shot forecasting aims to predict outcomes for previously unseen conditions without direct historical data, posing a significant challenge for traditional forecasting methods. We introduce a Resolution-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Forecasting model that enhances predictive accuracy by leveraging spatial correlations and temporal frequency characteristics. By decomposing signals into different frequency components, our model employs resolution-aware retrieval, where lower-frequency components rely on broader spatial context, while higher-frequency components focus on local influences. This allows the model to dynamically retrieve relevant data and adapt to new locations with minimal historical context. Applied to microclimate forecasting, our model significantly outperforms traditional forecasting methods, numerical weather prediction models, and modern foundation time series models, achieving 71% lower MSE than HRRR and 34% lower MSE than Chronos on the ERA5 dataset. Our results highlight the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented and resolution-aware strategies, offering a scalable and data-efficient solution for zero-shot forecasting in microclimate modeling and beyond.

We provide a brief background on counterfactuals. Further details can be found in [1].