IDOL: Meeting Diverse Distribution Shifts with Prior Physics for Tropical Cyclone Multi-Task Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces IDOL, a physics-guided learning framework that enhances tropical cyclone attribute estimation by enforcing physical invariance, thereby improving robustness against distribution shifts in real-time scenarios.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel IDOL framework that integrates prior physical knowledge into feature learning to better handle distribution shifts in tropical cyclone estimation.

Findings

IDOL outperforms existing methods across multiple datasets.

Imposing physical invariance improves generalization under distribution shifts.

The framework effectively estimates cyclone attributes like wind speed and pressure.

Abstract

Tropical Cyclone (TC) estimation aims to accurately estimate various TC attributes in real time. However, distribution shifts arising from the complex and dynamic nature of TC environmental fields, such as varying geographical conditions and seasonal changes, present significant challenges to reliable estimation. Most existing methods rely on multi-modal fusion for feature extraction but overlook the intrinsic distribution of feature representations, leading to poor generalization under out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this, we propose an effective Identity Distribution-Oriented Physical Invariant Learning framework (IDOL), which imposes identity-oriented constraints to regulate the feature space under the guidance of prior physical knowledge, thereby dealing distribution variability with physical invariance. Specifically, the proposed IDOL employs the wind field model and dark correlation knowledge of TC to model task-shared and task-specific identity tokens. These tokens capture task dependencies and intrinsic physical invariances of TC, enabling robust estimation of TC wind speed, pressure, inner-core, and outer-core size under distribution shifts. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets and tasks demonstrate the outperformance of the proposed IDOL, verifying that imposing identity-oriented constraints based on prior physical knowledge can effectively mitigates diverse distribution shifts in TC estimation.Code is available at https://github.com/Zjut-MultimediaPlus/IDOL.