Weather forecasting is important for science and society. At present, the most accurate forecast system is the numerical weather prediction (NWP) method, which represents atmospheric states as discretized grids and numerically solves partial differential equations that describe the transition between those states¹. However, this procedure is computationally expensive. Recently, artificial-intelligence-based methods² have shown potential in accelerating weather forecasting by orders of magnitude, but the forecast accuracy is still significantly lower than that of NWP methods. Here we introduce an artificial-intelligence-based method for accurate, medium-range global weather forecasting. We show that three-dimensional deep networks equipped with Earth-specific priors are effective at dealing with complex patterns in weather data, and that a hierarchical temporal aggregation strategy reduces accumulation errors in medium-range forecasting. Trained on 39 years of global data, our program, Pangu-Weather, obtains stronger deterministic forecast results on reanalysis data in all tested variables when compared with the world’s best NWP system, the operational integrated forecasting system of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)³. Our method also works well with extreme weather forecasts and ensemble forecasts. When initialized with reanalysis data, the accuracy of tracking tropical cyclones is also higher than that of ECMWF-HRES.

Learning discriminative representations for unseen person images is critical for person re-identification (ReID). Most of the current approaches learn deep representations in classification tasks, which essentially minimize the empirical classification risk on the training set. As shown in our experiments, such representations easily get over-fitted on a discriminative human body part on the training set. To gain the discriminative power on unseen person images, we propose a deep representation learning procedure named part loss network, to minimize both the empirical classification risk on training person images and the representation learning risk on unseen person images. The representation learning risk is evaluated by the proposed part loss, which automatically detects human body parts and computes the person classification loss on each part separately. Compared with traditional global classification loss, simultaneously considering part loss enforces the deep network to learn representations for different body parts and gain the discriminative power on unseen persons. Experimental results on three person ReID datasets, i.e., Market1501, CUHK03 and VIPeR, show that our representation outperforms existing deep representations.

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great success in modeling 3D scenes and synthesizing novel-view images. However, most previous NeRF methods take much time to optimize one single scene. Explicit data structures, e.g. voxel features, show great potential to accelerate the training process. However, voxel features face two big challenges to be applied to dynamic scenes, i.e. modeling temporal information and capturing different scales of point motions. We propose a radiance field framework by representing scenes with time-aware voxel features, named as TiNeuVox. A tiny coordinate deformation network is introduced to model coarse motion trajectories and temporal information is further enhanced in the radiance network. A multi-distance interpolation method is proposed and applied on voxel features to model both small and large motions. Our framework significantly accelerates the optimization of dynamic radiance fields while maintaining high rendering quality. Empirical evaluation is performed on both synthetic and real scenes. Our TiNeuVox completes training with only 8 minutes and 8-MB storage cost while showing similar or even better rendering performance than previous dynamic NeRF methods. Code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/TiNeuVox.

Objects in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images are generally small due to the high photography altitude. Although many efforts have been made in object detection, how to accurately and quickly detect small objects is still one of the remaining open challenges. In this paper, we propose a feature fusion and scaling-based single shot detector (FS-SSD) for small object detection in UAV images. FS-SSD is an enhancement based on FSSD, a variety of the original single shot multibox detector (SSD). We add an extra scaling branch of the deconvolution module with an average pooling operation to form a feature pyramid. The original feature fusion branch is adjusted to be better suited to the small object detection task. The two feature pyramids generated by the deconvolution module and feature fusion module are utilized to make predictions together. In addition to the deep features learned by FS-SSD, to further improve the detection accuracy, spatial context analysis is proposed to incorporate the object spatial relationships into object redetection. The interclass and intraclass distances between different object instances are computed as spatial context, which proves effective for multiclass small object detection. Six experiments are conducted on the PASCAL VOC dataset and two UAV image datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve a comparable detection speed but an accuracy superior to those of the six state-of-the-art methods.