aiqbench analysis
YingLan represents a significant advancement in applying foundation model architectures to heterogeneous scientific data, specifically integrating physics-informed constraints with dynamic encoding to handle diverse ocean observation sources. By leveraging domestic AI infrastructure like Huawei Ascend NPUs, this work demonstrates the viability of large-scale pretraining strategies for regional climate forecasting tasks such as sea surface salinity prediction. The approach effectively bridges the gap between task-specific modeling and unified representation learning in complex environmental systems.
YingLan: A Multimodal Ocean Foundation Model for Unified Representation Learning from Heterogeneous Observations
arXiv:2610.29313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal ocean modeling remains challenging due to substantial heterogeneity in data structures, physical semantics, and spatiotemporal characteristics across satellite imagery, gridded oceanographic fields, and buoy observations. Existing approaches largely focus on task-specific ocean modeling, while learning transferable representations from heterogeneous observations remains an open problem. To address this challenge, we propose YingLan, a multimodal ocean foundation model that integrates physics-attribute-conditioned dynamic encoding, Spatiotemporal Increment Coupling (STIC), and ocean-state evolution-aware pretraining. Specifically, the dynamic encoding mechanism generates adaptive input projections conditioned on physical semantics and observation characteristics, enabling flexible representation of heterogeneous ocean variables. STIC models multiscale spatiotemporal dependencies through cross-scale interactions of latent temporal increments. The pretraining strategy further combines masked observation reconstruction with temporal evolution objectives to facilitate the learning of coherent ocean-state representations across different prediction horizons. YingLan is implemented using MindSpore and trained on Huawei Ascend 910B NPUs, demonstrating its compatibility with domestic AI computing infrastructure. In a seven-day sea surface salinity (SSS) forecasting task conducted in the Shenzhen coastal waters, YingLan achieves an average RMSE of 0.687508 PSU, corresponding to relative error reductions of 0.58%, 5.31%, and 12.42% compared with LangYa, XiHe, and GloNet2, respectively. These results provide initial evidence of the model's effectiveness in regional ocean forecasting, while broader cross-task and cross-regional evaluations remain necessary to assess its generalization capabilities.
Abstract:Multimodal ocean modeling remains challenging due to substantial heterogeneity in data structures, physical semantics, and spatiotemporal characteristics across satellite imagery, gridded oceanographic fields, and buoy observations. Existing approaches largely focus on task-specific ocean modeling, while learning transferable representations from heterogeneous observations remains an open problem. To address this challenge, we propose YingLan, a multimodal ocean foundation model that integrates physics-attribute-conditioned dynamic encoding, Spatiotemporal Increment Coupling (STIC), and ocean-state evolution-aware pretraining. Specifically, the dynamic encoding mechanism generates adaptive input projections conditioned on physical semantics and observation characteristics, enabling flexible representation of heterogeneous ocean variables. STIC models multiscale spatiotemporal dependencies through cross-scale interactions of latent temporal increments. The pretraining strategy further combines masked observation reconstruction with temporal evolution objectives to facilitate the learning of coherent ocean-state representations across different prediction horizons. YingLan is implemented using MindSpore and trained on Huawei Ascend 910B NPUs, demonstrating its compatibility with domestic AI computing infrastructure. In a seven-day sea surface salinity (SSS) forecasting task conducted in the Shenzhen coastal waters, YingLan achieves an average RMSE of 0.687508 PSU, corresponding to relative error reductions of 0.58%, 5.31%, and 12.42% compared with LangYa, XiHe, and GloNet2, respectively. These results provide initial evidence of the model's effectiveness in regional ocean forecasting, while broader cross-task and cross-regional evaluations remain necessary to assess its generalization capabilities.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2610.29313 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.29313v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.29313 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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