Singapore

The accelerating pace of global warming, confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), underscores the urgent need for continuous environmental monitoring and adaptive modeling frameworks. Therefore, this study explores AI-driven temperature forecasting across New Zealand using real observations from the national MetService network within the TAIAO data science programme. We evaluate a diverse set of models, from statistical baselines to deep neural networks, foundation models, and graph-based architectures, to assess their capacity for adaptive, spatially aware prediction. Our results show that graph-based representations substantially improve the modeling of spatial and temporal dependencies, while foundation models demonstrate robust generalization across diverse climatic regions. The integration of these paradigms produces forecasts that are both more accurate and more interpretable. The findings highlight the potential of adaptive AI frameworks to improve environmental monitoring, detect regional anomalies, and strengthen climate resilience strategies in New Zealand.

AAAI 2026

Environmental Monitoring in New Zealand: Exploring Spatiotemporal Relationships

spatiotemporal modeling

foundation models

environmental monitoring

graph neural networks

workshop paper

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.<br><br>

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Recent 3D novel view synthesis (NVS) methods often require extensive 3D data for training, and also typically lack generalization beyond the training distribution. Moreover, they tend to be object centric and struggle with complex and intricate scenes. Conversely, 3D-free methods can generate text-controlled views of complex, in-the-wild scenes using a pretrained stable diffusion model without the need for a large amount of 3D-based training data, but lack camera control. In this paper, we introduce a method capable of generating camera-controlled viewpoints from a single input image, by combining the benefits of 3D-free and 3D-based approaches. Our method excels in handling complex and diverse scenes without extensive training or additional 3D and multiview data. It leverages widely available pretrained NVS models for weak guidance, integrating this knowledge into a 3D-free view synthesis style approach, along with enriching the CLIP vision-language space with 3D camera angle information, to achieve the desired results. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing models in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, achieving high-fidelity, consistent novel view synthesis at desired camera angles across a wide variety of scenes while maintaining accurate, natural detail representation and image clarity across various viewpoints. We also support our method with a comprehensive analysis of 2D image generation models and the 3D space, providing a solid foundation and rationale for our solution. Furthermore, the proposed framework contributes to scenario generation and ecological visualization by enabling controllable, multi-view synthesis of natural and urban environments from limited imagery. This capability can support climate impact simulations and environmental narrative synthesis, aligning with recent advances in generative AI and foundation models for scientific and ecological applications.

3D-free meets 3D priors: Novel View Synthesis from a Single Image with Pretrained Diffusion Guidance

Machine learning inference occurs at a massive scale, yet its environmental impact remains poorly quantified, especially on low-resource hardware. We present ML-EcoLyzer, a cross-framework tool for measuring the carbon, energy, thermal, and water costs of inference across CPUs, consumer GPUs, and datacenter accelerators. The tool supports both classical and modern models, applying adaptive monitoring and hardware-aware evaluation.

We introduce the Environmental Sustainability Score (ESS), which quantifies the number of effective parameters served per gram of CO$_2$ emitted. Our evaluation covers over 1,900 inference configurations, spanning diverse model architectures, task modalities (text, vision, audio, tabular), hardware types, and precision levels. These rigorous and reliable measurements demonstrate that quantization enhances ESS, huge accelerators can be inefficient for lightweight applications, and even small models may incur significant costs when implemented suboptimally. ML-EcoLyzer sets a standard for sustainability-conscious model selection and offers an extensive empirical evaluation of environmental costs during inference.

ML-EcoLyzer: Quantifying the Environmental Cost of Machine Learning Inference Across Frameworks and Hardware

We present the Hierarchical AI-Meteorologist, an LLM-agent system that generates explainable weather reports using a hierarchical forecast reasoning and weather keyword generation. Unlike standard approaches that treat forecasts as flat time series, our framework performs multi-scale reasoning across hourly, 6-hour, and daily aggregations to capture both short-term dynamics and long-term trends. Its core reasoning agent converts structured meteorological inputs into coherent narratives while simultaneously extracting a few keywords effectively summarizing the dominant meteorological events. These keywords serve as semantic anchors for validating consistency, temporal coherence and factual alignment of the generated reports. Using OpenWeather and Meteostat data, we demonstrate that hierarchical context and keyword-based validation substantially improve interpretability and robustness of LLM-generated weather narratives, offering a reproducible framework for semantic evaluation of automated meteorological reporting and advancing agent-based scientific reasoning.

Hierarchical AI-Meteorologist: LLM-Agent System for Multi-Scale and Explainable Weather Forecast Reporting

Rising sea levels pose an imminent hazard to coastal communities that depend on the sea for their livelihood. This paper presents a robust computational technique for forecasting tidal surge and resulting shoreline changes in the vulnerable Krishna-Godavari (KG) Delta, India. To ensure the reliability of decades-long projections and directly address the methodological shortcomings of prior work, this study is grounded in an multi-decadal historical dataset spanning 39 years (1977--2015), thus providing a scientifically justifiable temporal basis. The core methodology employs a deep-learning architecture: the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)network. To maximize its predictive efficiency, the LSTM's critical hyperparameters are rigorously optimized using the nature-inspired meta-heuristic : the K-means Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA). This novel hybrid KWOA-LSTM approach achieves superior predictive performance over conventional models, demonstrated by a R2 score of 0.916 and a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.012. The predicted and forecasted surge values, computed by the optimized model, are visualized via the Google Earth Engine elevation map. Forecasts indicate significant saline intrusion and inundation will affect the KG Delta by 2060, posing a grave threat to the region's food security. The utilization of WOA for hyperparameter tuning, combined with the multi-decadal dataset, establishes a highly accurate and scientifically rigorous framework for long-term coastal hazard assessment and proactive planning.

Coastal Shoreline Dynamics in the Krishna - Godavari Delta Using K-Means Whale Optimized Long Short Term Memory Networks

Reliable detection of methane plumes in vegetated regions remains challenging due to the spectral similarity between vegetation reflectance and methane absorption features, as well as the coarse spectral resolution of freely available multispectral satellites such as Sentinel-2. To address this problem, we propose VegiSR, a vegetation-aware spectral super-resolution framework that reconstructs EMIT-like hyperspectral representations from Sentinel-2 imagery. VegiSR leverages cross-sensor spectral learning using a large-scale Sentinel-2 and EMIT paired dataset we constructed, and incorporates a vegetation-aware spectral regularization and spectral attention mechanism to suppress vegetation-induced confusion while enhancing methane-sensitive wavelengths. The reconstructed hyperspectral data is then integrated with matched filter to detect methane plumes in vegetated area where direct Sentinel-2 detection fails. Experimental results demonstrate that VegiSR achieves superior spectral reconstruction fidelity and significantly improves methane detection accuracy over
vegetated surfaces compared to U-Net and direct Sentinel-2 methods. This work highlights the potential of cross-sensor spectral super resolution for global methane monitoring using free multispectral observations.

Learning Cross-Sensor Spectral Super-Resolution for Methane Plume Detection over Vegetated Areas Using Sentinel-2 and EMIT Data

Processing wildlife imagery for conservation and management poses significant challenges, especially when limited data hinders the ability of classification models to extract sufficient features from each wildlife class. In this study, we propose the use of a 3D free-viewpoint image-to-video generative model to augment the dataset by synthesizing new images for fine-tuning classification models. Our results demonstrate a notable improvement in the F1-score, increasing from a baseline of 0.338 to 0.525. While the quality of the synthesized images can be further enhanced, particularly in terms of incorporating wildlife-specific semantics, the study highlights the potential of generative AI not only for media creation but also for advancing environmental monitoring applications, despite challenges such as high computational cost.

Diffusion-based free-viewpoint synthesis for dataset expansion and wildlife classification

Recent progress in vision language models (VLMs) has enabled remarkable perception and reasoning capabilities, yet their potential for scientific regression in Earth Observation (EO) remains largely unexplored. Existing EO datasets mainly emphasize semantic understanding tasks such as captioning or classification, lacking benchmarks that align multimodal perception with measurable biophysical variables. To fill this gap, we present REO-Instruct, the first unified benchmark designed for both descriptive and regression tasks in EO. REO-Instruct establishes a cognitively interpretable logic chain in forest ecological scenario: human activity → land-cover classification → ecological patch counting → above-ground biomass (AGB) regression, bridging qualitative understanding and quantitative prediction. The dataset integrates co-registered Sentinel-2 and ALOS-2 imagery with structured textual annotations generated and validated through a hybrid human–AI pipeline. Comprehensive evaluation protocols and baseline results across generic VLMs reveal that current models struggle with numeric reasoning, highlighting an essential challenge for scientific VLMs. REO-Instruct offers a standardized foundation for developing and assessing next-generation geospatial models capable of both description and scientific inference. The dataset will be publicly available.

Towards Unified Vision Language Models for Forest Ecological Analysis in Earth Observation

Typical domestic Immersion water heater systems are always turned on during the winter, it heats quickly rather than efficiently and ignores predictable demand windows and ambient losses. We study deadline-aware control, where the aim is to reach a target temperature at a specified time while minimising energy. We introduce an efficient Gymnasium environment that models an immersion hot-water heater with first-order thermal losses and discrete on and off actions ${0, 6000}$ W applied every 120 s. Methods include a time-optimal bang-bang baseline, a zero-shot Monte Carlo Tree Search planner, and a Proximal Policy Optimization policy. We report total energy (Wh) under identical physics. Across sweeps of initial temperature (10–30 °C), deadline (30–90 steps), and target temperature (40–80 °C), PPO achieves the most energy-efficient performance at a 60-step horizon (2 h) it uses 3.23 kWh, versus bang-bang’s 4.37–10.45 kWh and MCTS’s 4.18–6.46 kWh, yielding savings of 26\% at 30 steps and 69\% at 90 steps. In a representative trajectory (50 kg, 20 °C ambient, 60 °C target), PPO consumes 54\% less energy than bang-bang and 33\% less than MCTS. These results show that learned, deadline-aware control reduces energy under identical physics where planners provide partial savings without training, while policies offer near-zero-cost inference once trained.

Deadline-Aware, Energy-Efficient Control of Domestic Immersion Hot Water Heater

Infrared and visible object detection (IVOD) is essential for numerous around-the-clock applications. Despite notable advancements, current IVOD models exhibit notable performance declines when confronted with incomplete modality data, particularly if the dominant modality is missing. In this paper, we take a thorough investigation on modality incomplete IVOD problem from an architecture compatibility perspective. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play Scarf Neck module for DETR variants, which introduces a modalityagnostic deformable attention mechanism to enable the IVOD detector to flexibly adapt to any single or double modalities during training and inference. When training Scarf-DETR, we design a pseudo modality dropout strategy to fully utilize the multi-modality information, making the detector compatible and robust to both working modes of single and double modalities. Moreover, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark for the modality-incomplete IVOD task aimed at thoroughly assessing situations where the absent modality is either dominant or secondary. Our proposed Scarf-DETR not only performs excellently in missing modality scenarios but also achieves superior performances on the standard IVOD modality complete benchmarks. We will release our code.

On Modality Incomplete Infrared-Visible Object Detection: An Architecture Compatibility Perspective

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a critical paradigm for medical image segmentation, mitigating the immense cost of dense annotations. However, prevailing SSL frameworks are fundamentally “inward-looking”, recycling information and biases solely from within the target dataset. This design triggers a vicious cycle of confirmation bias under class imbalance, leading to the catastrophic failure to recognize minority classes. To dismantle this systemic issue, we propose a paradigm shift to a multi-level “outward-looking” framework. Our primary innovation is Foundational Knowledge Distillation (FKD), which looks outward beyond the confines of medical imaging by introducing a pre-trained visual foundation model, DINOv3, as an unbiased external semantic teacher. Instead of trusting the student’s biased high confidence, our method distills knowledge from DINOv3’s robust understanding of high semantic uniqueness, providing a stable, cross-domain supervisory signal that anchors the learning of minority classes. To complement this core strategy, we further look outward within the data by proposing Progressive Imbalance-aware CutMix (PIC), which creates a dynamic curriculum that adaptively forces the model to focus on minority classes in both labeled and unlabeled subsets. This layered strategy forms our framework, DINO-Mix, which breaks the vicious cycle of bias and achieves remarkable performance on challenging semi-supervised class-imbalanced medical image segmentation benchmarks Synapse and AMOS.

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3D-free meets 3D priors: Novel View Synthesis from a Single Image with Pretrained Diffusion Guidance

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