FNP: Fourier Neural Processes for Arbitrary-Resolution Data Assimilation

Data assimilation is a vital component in modern global medium-range weather forecasting systems to obtain the best estimation of the atmospheric state by combining the short-term forecast and observations. Recently, AI-based data assimilation approaches have attracted increasing attention for their significant advantages over traditional techniques in terms of computational consumption. However, existing AI-based data assimilation methods can only handle observations with a specific resolution, lacking the compatibility and generalization ability to assimilate observations with other resolutions. Considering that complex real-world observations often have different resolutions, we propose the \textit{\textbf{Fourier Neural Processes}} (FNP) for \textit{arbitrary-resolution data assimilation} in this paper. Leveraging the efficiency of the designed modules and flexible structure of neural processes, FNP achieves state-of-the-art results in assimilating observations with varying resolutions, and also exhibits increasing advantages over the counterparts as the resolution and the amount of observations increase. Moreover, our FNP trained on a fixed resolution can directly handle the assimilation of observations with out-of-distribution resolutions and the observational information reconstruction task without additional fine-tuning, demonstrating its excellent generalization ability across data resolutions as well as across tasks.

Paper

Similar papers

Peer review

Reviewer oAJc6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-07

Summary

This paper proposes an innovative Fourier Neural Process (FNP) model designed to address the limitations of existing data assimilation methods when handling observational data of varying resolutions. The FNP model combines the characteristics of neural processes and Fourier transforms to effectively assimilate observational data of arbitrary resolutions. Extensive experiments were conducted on the ERA5 dataset, demonstrating the superior performance of FNP in assimilating observational data of different resolutions.

Strengths

1. The FNP addresses the limitation of existing data assimilation methods that cannot assimilate observational data of varying resolutions. Additionally, the proposed FNP, based on neural processes, provides uncertainty estimates compared to deterministic data assimilation. 2. The smoothing of high-frequency information is addressed by using the Fourier neural operator, which preserves high-frequency information. Experimental results show that the proposed Neural Fourier layer improves performance both visually and in terms of metrics. 3. FNP achieves state-of-the-art performance in arbitrary-resolution data assimilation for key weather variables.

Weaknesses

1. The ERA5 dataset is global meteorological data with limited high-frequency information. Validation on datasets with richer high-frequency information (e.g., HRRR) could better demonstrate the effectiveness of the Neural Fourier layer and provide more confidence. 2. The role of FNP in weather forecast tasks is not thoroughly discussed or experimentally validated.

Questions

none

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

see above

Reviewer Y68H4/10 · confidence 2/52024-07-09

Summary

The paper introduces a new approach (Fourier Neural Processes, FNP) for weather data assimilation using data from different resolutions. The authors show that the new approach improves the results over similar data assimilation networks from earlier papers.

Strengths

The paper demonstrates well the advantages of the proposed model to the similar ConvCNP network. The authors perform a thorough analysis of the ability of the method to assimilate the most relevant atmospheric variables. The paper also addresses an important area in the atmospheric ML data chain that has received less attention than e.g. weather forecasting.

Weaknesses

I found the paper rather hard to follow. Concepts like "spatial variable functional representation" and "dynamic alignment and merge" are not well explained. As a result, even having previous experience of Fourier neural operators it is difficult to get a sense of what the network actually does. The authors refer the reader to previous papers on the subject, but I feel the current paper would need to better explain these ideas to a reader from outside the specific niche of research to be accessible for the NeurIPS audience.

Questions

Figure 4 and section 4.2 refer to fine-tuning the model and present better results for the fine-tuned version. What does the fine-tuning involve? I don't get a good picture of this from the paper.

Rating

4

Confidence

2

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

The paper does an adequate job of explaining the limitations of the current model, and makes useful suggestions for further development. However, the difficulty of understanding the paper makes it harder to assess if the work has additional limitations that are not well addressed.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-11

Hoping for your feedback

Dear reviewer, Thank you for your question. We believe we have adequately addressed all of the issues you raised in your review. We would like to emphasize that data assimilation is a very important area that has taken AI-based weather forecasting one step further toward practical operational applications. Compared to existing work, our approach has greater potential and a wider range of applications to advance the meteorology field and benefit society. If your question has been satisfactorily addressed, we hope you will review and possibly update your score. We are willing to address any additional questions or concerns you may have. Thank you.

Reviewer 3aNd6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-12

Summary

This paper proposes a new variant of neural processes called Fourier Neural Processes (FNPs) to solve the data assimilation problem with arbitrary solution, which is an important component in modern weather forecast system. The proposed method based on FNP has better computational efficiency, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in assimilating observations with varying resolutions on large-scale simulated data.

Strengths

This paper focuses on applying neural processes to the data assimilation problem in weather forecast system. Different from many previous work in this area which mainly focus on toy examples, or hand designed problems, this work solves a real application problem that has high impact. I really enjoy this paper and would love to see more work like this in our area.

Weaknesses

The primary issue with this paper is its technical clarity. The majority of the technical nuances are conveyed through textual descriptions, and at times, the terminology is not adequately explained. It would be beneficial if the authors could provide the precise mathematical formalisms for key modules such as the “Spatial-variable decoupled representation,” the Neural Fourier layer, and DAM. Although one can how these modules work, a definitive mathematical expression would greatly alleviate any confusion. I am also slightly confused by the following usage of words: 1. Conditional points/conditional domain. Do you mean "context" as supposed to "target"? 2. Variable dimension. Do you mean the dimension across different meteorological variables at the same spatial location? 3. What do you mean by "dynamics" at line 175. 4. Line 228, the term RMSE is a statistical metric used way beyond geospatial analysis and atmospheric science. So you might want to use something else to refer to the special "latitude-weighted" version.

Questions

See weakness. I would like to also ask the following: 1. What do you think is the main reason that FNP outperforms ConvCNPs? What do you think is the most important innovation of FNP for the data assimilation problem, given that ConvNPs (https://proceedings.nips.cc/paper/2020/file/5df0385cba256a135be596dbe28fa7aa-Paper.pdf) already has applications for Environmental Data. 2. Why the neural Fourier layer (NFL) is more computational efficient than standard conv layers, if NFL contains three branches, one one branch is Conv operations?

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

The authors have thoroughly discussed the limitations of this work.

Reviewer 95HC6/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-13

Summary

The authors propose a method for arbitrary-resolution data assimilation, called Fourier Neural Processes (FNP). This approach improves generalization by addressing resolution limitations in existing methods. Key features include unified coordinate transformation, spatial-variable functional representation, and dynamic alignment and merge (DAM). The method effectively integrates diverse observational data without the need for fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate its relatively good performance in handling varied data sources.

Strengths

(+) This method is the first to address the challenge of data assimilation with arbitrary resolutions. (+) The authors introduce the neural processes to arbitrary-resolution data assimilation. (+) Demonstrating excellent generalization, the proposed method can perform observational information reconstruction directly from training on data assimilation, without requiring fine-tuning. (+) Each proposed component is simple yet effective, as shown in the ablation study.

Weaknesses

Since the authors aim to address arbitrary-resolution data assimilation with good generalization ability, it would be beneficial to clearly highlight the key observations or components for this problem upfront. The authors quickly delve into the pipeline description without first presenting the key and unique idea of their method for this problem. It takes readers some time to figure out, 'How does this method solve the issue of arbitrary resolution in data assimilation?'

Questions

Could the authors clarify the unique contributions of their method in addressing the issue of arbitrary resolution from a design perspective? It seems that the core of your approach relies on interpolation in the feature space. If the generalization ability for arbitrary resolutions is primarily due to this interpolation, does this mean that integrating similar interpolation techniques into any deep learning method could achieve similar improvements in generalization?

Rating

6

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

The authors point out the key limitation of their method: it has not been tested on a real-world dataset due to the lack of relevant benchmarks and large-scale datasets in the data assimilation community.

Reviewer 95HC2024-08-12

Response to Author Rebuttal

Thank you for the detailed responses. I’ve reviewed the comments from other reviewers as well as your replies. I’m curious about the performance if both NFL and SVD are removed simultaneously. Additionally, if SVD alone is removed, does the generalization capability (arbitrary resolution) of the proposed method primarily stem from the unified coordinate transformation?

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

I'm sorry that we can't give the quantitative performance when removing both NFL and SVD simultaneously due to the lack of time left. But based on the above experimental results and our experience, all modules are helpful to the performance, so its performance should be better than ConvCNP and worse than other FNP models. As we mentioned above, all modules, including DAM and NFL, can help improve the generalization capability. From an experimental point of view, the results in Table A prove that both DAM and NFL can improve generalization. From a theoretical point of view, the dynamic alignment in DAM can help the model capture the spatial relationship between data, and the frequency-domain analysis in NFL provides a global perspective, which can better reflect the overall characteristics of the signal at various resolutions. We would like to emphasize that data assimilation is a very important field that brings AI-based weather forecasting one step closer to practical applications. Compared to existing work, our approach addresses the challenges of arbitrary-resolution assimilation. It not only significantly improves the performance of data assimilation, but also has greater potential and a wider range of applications to advance the field of meteorology and benefit society. If your question has been answered satisfactorily, we hope you will review and possibly update your rating. We are willing to address any additional questions or concerns you may have. Once again, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to you!

Reviewer 95HC2024-08-13

Thanks for the authors’ detailed explanation. If SVD is removed, does the ability to handle arbitrary resolution rely solely on the unified coordinate transformation? Is my understanding correct?

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

From an implementation perspective, accepting inputs of arbitrary resolution is because the operations in the model are independent of the input size. Unified coordinate transformation is one of them, but in addition, they also include operations such as convolution, interpolation, frequency domain transformation, etc.

Area Chair aaMY2024-08-08

Paper discussion and rating finalization

Dear Reviewers, Can you please have a look at the reports of the other reviewers and also the rebuttal from the authors and respond to their questions, if available, then discuss any issues of your concern, finalise and reach a consensus about the rating of the paper before the deadline of the next Tuesday, 13th August? Thank you very much for your time, effort and contribution to the organization of NeurIPS 20024, AC

Area Chair aaMY2024-08-11

Reminder of the deadline

Dear Reviewers, While the deadline, Tuesday, 13th August, is approaching, can you please check at your early convenience the rebuttal from the authors, make or require further clarifications, if necessary, and interact with the authors over any further issues/concerns you may still have, and finalise the rating of the paper soon. Even though you have no further issues/concerns, you may want to acknowledge the responses to your questions in the rebuttal from the authors. Thank you very much for your time, effort and contribution to the organization of NeurIPS 2024, AC

Reviewer 3aNd2024-08-12

Response to Author Rebuttal

Thanks a lot for the explanation! They have addressed my confusion and questions. It would be good to incorporate them in the writing. My original rating will remain unchanged.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Thank you again for your recognition of our work and your efforts to help us improve the paper!

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Thank you again for your recognition of our work and your efforts to help us improve the paper!

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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