GRIT-LP: Graph Transformer with Long-Range Skip Connection and Partitioned Spatial Graphs for Accurate Ice Layer Thickness Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Zesheng, Rahnemoonfar, Maryam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Zesheng
Rahnemoonfar, Maryam
author_facet Liu, Zesheng
Rahnemoonfar, Maryam
contents Graph transformers have demonstrated remarkable capability on complex spatio-temporal tasks, yet their depth is often limited by oversmoothing and weak long-range dependency modeling. To address these challenges, we introduce GRIT-LP, a graph transformer explicitly designed for polar ice-layer thickness estimation from polar radar imagery. Accurately estimating ice layer thickness is critical for understanding snow accumulation, reconstructing past climate patterns and reducing uncertainties in projections of future ice sheet evolution and sea level rise. GRIT-LP combines an inductive geometric graph learning framework with self-attention mechanism, and introduces two major innovations that jointly address challenges in modeling the spatio-temporal patterns of ice layers: a partitioned spatial graph construction strategy that forms overlapping, fully connected local neighborhoods to preserve spatial coherence and suppress noise from irrelevant long-range links, and a long-range skip connection mechanism within the transformer that improves information flow and mitigates oversmoothing in deeper attention layers. We conducted extensive experiments, demonstrating that GRIT-LP outperforms current state-of-the-art methods with a 24.92\% improvement in root mean squared error. These results highlight the effectiveness of graph transformers in modeling spatiotemporal patterns by capturing both localized structural features and long-range dependencies across internal ice layers, and demonstrate their potential to advance data-driven understanding of cryospheric processes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18716
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GRIT-LP: Graph Transformer with Long-Range Skip Connection and Partitioned Spatial Graphs for Accurate Ice Layer Thickness Prediction
Liu, Zesheng
Rahnemoonfar, Maryam
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graph transformers have demonstrated remarkable capability on complex spatio-temporal tasks, yet their depth is often limited by oversmoothing and weak long-range dependency modeling. To address these challenges, we introduce GRIT-LP, a graph transformer explicitly designed for polar ice-layer thickness estimation from polar radar imagery. Accurately estimating ice layer thickness is critical for understanding snow accumulation, reconstructing past climate patterns and reducing uncertainties in projections of future ice sheet evolution and sea level rise. GRIT-LP combines an inductive geometric graph learning framework with self-attention mechanism, and introduces two major innovations that jointly address challenges in modeling the spatio-temporal patterns of ice layers: a partitioned spatial graph construction strategy that forms overlapping, fully connected local neighborhoods to preserve spatial coherence and suppress noise from irrelevant long-range links, and a long-range skip connection mechanism within the transformer that improves information flow and mitigates oversmoothing in deeper attention layers. We conducted extensive experiments, demonstrating that GRIT-LP outperforms current state-of-the-art methods with a 24.92\% improvement in root mean squared error. These results highlight the effectiveness of graph transformers in modeling spatiotemporal patterns by capturing both localized structural features and long-range dependencies across internal ice layers, and demonstrate their potential to advance data-driven understanding of cryospheric processes.
title GRIT-LP: Graph Transformer with Long-Range Skip Connection and Partitioned Spatial Graphs for Accurate Ice Layer Thickness Prediction
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18716