GREAT: Generalizable Representation Enhancement via Auxiliary Transformations for Zero-Shot Environmental Prediction

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Main Authors: Luo, Shiyuan, Qiu, Chonghao, Yu, Runlong, Xie, Yiqun, Jia, Xiaowei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Luo, Shiyuan
Qiu, Chonghao
Yu, Runlong
Xie, Yiqun
Jia, Xiaowei
author_facet Luo, Shiyuan
Qiu, Chonghao
Yu, Runlong
Xie, Yiqun
Jia, Xiaowei
contents Environmental modeling faces critical challenges in predicting ecosystem dynamics across unmonitored regions due to limited and geographically imbalanced observation data. This challenge is compounded by spatial heterogeneity, causing models to learn spurious patterns that fit only local data. Unlike conventional domain generalization, environmental modeling must preserve invariant physical relationships and temporal coherence during augmentation. In this paper, we introduce Generalizable Representation Enhancement via Auxiliary Transformations (GREAT), a framework that effectively augments available datasets to improve predictions in completely unseen regions. GREAT guides the augmentation process to ensure that the original governing processes can be recovered from the augmented data, and the inclusion of the augmented data leads to improved model generalization. Specifically, GREAT learns transformation functions at multiple layers of neural networks to augment both raw environmental features and temporal influence. They are refined through a novel bi-level training process that constrains augmented data to preserve key patterns of the original source data. We demonstrate GREAT's effectiveness on stream temperature prediction across six ecologically diverse watersheds in the eastern U.S., each containing multiple stream segments. Experimental results show that GREAT significantly outperforms existing methods in zero-shot scenarios. This work provides a practical solution for environmental applications where comprehensive monitoring is infeasible.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_13469
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GREAT: Generalizable Representation Enhancement via Auxiliary Transformations for Zero-Shot Environmental Prediction
Luo, Shiyuan
Qiu, Chonghao
Yu, Runlong
Xie, Yiqun
Jia, Xiaowei
Machine Learning
Environmental modeling faces critical challenges in predicting ecosystem dynamics across unmonitored regions due to limited and geographically imbalanced observation data. This challenge is compounded by spatial heterogeneity, causing models to learn spurious patterns that fit only local data. Unlike conventional domain generalization, environmental modeling must preserve invariant physical relationships and temporal coherence during augmentation. In this paper, we introduce Generalizable Representation Enhancement via Auxiliary Transformations (GREAT), a framework that effectively augments available datasets to improve predictions in completely unseen regions. GREAT guides the augmentation process to ensure that the original governing processes can be recovered from the augmented data, and the inclusion of the augmented data leads to improved model generalization. Specifically, GREAT learns transformation functions at multiple layers of neural networks to augment both raw environmental features and temporal influence. They are refined through a novel bi-level training process that constrains augmented data to preserve key patterns of the original source data. We demonstrate GREAT's effectiveness on stream temperature prediction across six ecologically diverse watersheds in the eastern U.S., each containing multiple stream segments. Experimental results show that GREAT significantly outperforms existing methods in zero-shot scenarios. This work provides a practical solution for environmental applications where comprehensive monitoring is infeasible.
title GREAT: Generalizable Representation Enhancement via Auxiliary Transformations for Zero-Shot Environmental Prediction
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13469