Decision-Oriented Uncertainty Quantification for Risk Control in Earth System Spatiotemporal Foundation Models

📅 2026-09-13
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
本文提出了一种面向决策的不确定性量化框架,用于地球系统时空基础模型的风险控制,通过预测分布和决策风险适配器来提高高影响应用中的决策可靠性。
📝 Abstract
Earth system modeling is shifting from task-specific predictors toward foundation models with general spatiotemporal representation capabilities. Although these models can jointly encode dynamic Earth fields, external forcings, and static geographic context for multistep forecasting, accurate point predictions or statistically calibrated intervals alone are insufficient for high-impact applications such as extremeweather warning, flood control, renewable-energy dispatch, and emergency resource allocation. What matters in practice is whether predictive uncertainty can be translated into reliable decision risk under specific actions, loss functions, and risk preferences. We propose a decision-oriented uncertainty quantification framework for Earth system spatiotemporal foundation models. The framework produces predictive distributions of future states and uses a decision risk adapter to map forecast samples, decision context, and utility functions into action-conditional risks. A utility-aware calibration module further enforces reliability at the downstream decision-loss level rather than only at the forecast-value level. Calibrated risks are then used to select warning, dispatch, inspection, or resource-allocation actions. Compared with the strongest baseline, the proposed method reduces decision regret by 18.7%, lowers the missed-event rate from 14.2% to 9.1%, and improves expected utility by 11.6%, while maintaining 90.4% predictive coverage and reducing decision calibration error from 0.083 to 0.047. These results suggest that decision-oriented uncertainty quantification can improve the robustness and operational value of Earth system foundation models in risk-sensitive applications.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

uncertainty quantification
decision risk
earth system models
spatiotemporal foundation models
risk control
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

decision-oriented uncertainty quantification
spatiotemporal foundation models
risk adapter
utility-aware calibration
earth system modeling
J
Ji Lu
Vanderbilt University, United States
H
Huiran Duan
City University of New York, United States
B
Bo Zhao
Yale University, United States
X
Xianglong Wang
Wyze Inc., United States
Y
Yiru Fang
Wyze Inc., United States
K
Kuo Yang
Northeastern University, United States
Xiaoqin Feng
Xiaoqin Feng
University of Southern California
LLM/Agent/Application/Data/Evaluation
Jianping Gou
Jianping Gou
Southwest University
Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning