Seasonal-scale climate prediction plays a critical role in supporting agricultural planning, disaster prevention, and long-term decision making. In particular, reliable forecasts issued 1-6 months in advance are essential for early warning of flood and drought risks associated with precipitation during the East Asian summer monsoon season. However, while the use of machine learning techniques has advanced rapidly in weather and subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasting, partly driven by the availability of benchmark datasets, their application to seasonal-scale prediction remains limited. Existing seasonal prediction primarily relies on ensemble forecasts from numerical models, which, while physically grounded, are subject to biases and uncertainties at long lead times. Motivated by these challenges, we propose SeasonBench-EA, a benchmark dataset for seasonal prediction in East Asia region. It features multi-resolution, multi-source data with both regional and global coverage, integrating ERA5 reanalysis data and ensemble forecasts from multiple leading forecast centers. Beyond key atmospheric fields, the dataset also includes boundary-related variables, such as ocean state, soil and solar radiation, that are essential for capturing seasonal-scale atmospheric variability. Two tasks are defined and evaluated: 1) machine learning-based seasonal prediction using ERA5 reanalysis, and 2) post-processing of seasonal forecasts from numerical model ensembles. A suite of deterministic and probabilistic metrics is provided for tasks evaluation, along with a hindcast assessment focused on precipitation during the East Asian summer monsoon, aligned with model evaluation protocols used in operations. By offering a unified data and evaluation framework, SeasonBench-EA aims to promote the development and application of data-driven methods for seasonal prediction, a challenging yet highly impactful task with board implications for society and public well-being. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/SauryChen/SeasonBench-EA.

Modern precipitation forecasting systems, including reanalysis datasets, numerical models, and AI-based approaches, typically produce coarse-resolution gridded outputs. The process of converting these outputs to station-level predictions often introduces substantial spatial biases relative to station-level observations, especially in complex terrains or under extreme conditions. These biases stem from two core challenges: (i) $\textbf{station-level heterogeneity}$, with site-specific temporal and spatial dynamics; and (ii) $\textbf{oversmoothing}$, which blurs fine-scale variability in graph-based models. To address these issues, we propose $\textbf{DiffLiG}$ ($\underline{Diff}$usion-enhanced $\underline{Li}$quid $\underline{G}$raph with Attention Propagation), a graph neural network designed for precise spatial correction from gridded forecasts to station observations. DiffLiG integrates a GeoLiquidNet that adapts temporal encoding via site-aware OU dynamics, a graph neural network with a dynamic edge modulator that learns spatially adaptive connectivity, and a Probabilistic Diffusion Selector that generates and refines ensemble forecasts to mitigate oversmoothing. Experiments across multiple datasets show that DiffLiG consistently outperforms other methods, delivering more accurate and robust corrections across diverse geographic and climatic settings. Moreover, it achieves notable gains on other key meteorological variables, underscoring its generalizability and practical utility.

Reference-based super-resolution (RefSR) has the potential to build bridges across spatial and temporal resolutions of remote sensing images. However, existing RefSR methods are limited by the faithfulness of content reconstruction and the effectiveness of texture transfer in large scaling factors. Conditional diffusion models have opened up new opportunities for generating realistic high-resolution images, but effectively utilizing reference images within these models remains an area for further exploration. Furthermore, content fidelity is difficult to guarantee in areas without relevant reference information. To solve these issues, we propose a change-aware diffusion model named Ref-Diff for RefSR, using the land cover change priors to guide the denoising process explicitly. Specifically, we inject the priors into the denoising model to improve the utilization of reference information in unchanged areas and regulate the reconstruction of semantically relevant content in changed areas. With this powerful guidance, we decouple the semantics-guided denoising and reference texture-guided denoising processes to improve the model performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art RefSR methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The code and data are available at https://github.com/dongrunmin/RefDiff.

With the increasing spatial and temporal resolutions of obtained remote sensing (RS) images, effective compression becomes critical for storage, transmission, and large-scale in-memory processing. Although image compression methods achieve a series of breakthroughs for daily images, a straightforward application of these methods to RS domain underutilizes the properties of the RS images, such as content duplication, homogeneity, and temporal redundancy. This paper proposes a Spatial-Temporal Context model (STCM) for RS image compression, jointly leveraging context from a broader spatial scope and across different temporal images. Specifically, we propose a stacked diagonal masked module to expand the contextual reference scope, which is stackable and maintains its parallel capability. Furthermore, we propose spatial-temporal contextual adaptive coding to enable the entropy estimation to reference context across different temporal RS images at the same geographic location. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art compression methods on rate-distortion (RD) performance. For downstream tasks validation, our method reduces the bitrate by 52 times for single temporal images in the scene classification task while maintaining accuracy.

Intelligent penetration testing (pen-testing), utilising Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has gained attention due to its potential for improving testing efficiency and cost-effectiveness in evaluating network system security. Nonetheless, current approaches which rely on simplistic neural network architectures suffer limitations in transferability and their ability to generalise to new tasks, thus impeding their practical application. This paper aims to address these issues by formalising the pen-testing decision process as a Host-Centric Markov decision process (HC- MDP), as well as establishing a structural representation of the relationships among the hosts within a network system. Further, we propose a flexible policy architecture, the “SetTron”, that leverages this structural representation to augment architectural inductive bias in a DRL agent and then practically evaluate our approach on pen-testing simulator platforms. The findings show SetTron to demonstrate superior performance, in terms of learning efficiency and policy convergence, compared to state-of-the-art methods and baselines with shorter penetration sequences and enhanced rewards. Besides, SetTron exhibits remarkable zero-shot generalisation capabilities, enabling perfect transfer to new tasks with randomly placed target hosts, achieving a 100 % success rate, and outperforming baselines by a factor of 6 when comparing normalised scores.

Semi-supervised learning has attracted increasing attention in the large-scale land cover mapping task. However, existing methods overlook the potential to alleviate the class imbalance problem by selecting a suitable set of unlabeled data. Besides, in class-imbalanced scenarios, existing pseudo-labeling methods mostly only pick confident samples, failing to exploit the hard samples during training. To tackle these issues, we propose a unified Class-Aware Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation framework. The proposed framework consists of three key components. To construct a better semi-supervised learning dataset, we propose a class-aware unlabeled data selection method that is more balanced towards the minority classes. Based on the built dataset with improved class balance, we propose a Class-Balanced Cross Entropy loss, jointly considering the annotation bias and the class bias to re-weight the loss in both sample and class levels to alleviate the class imbalance problem. Moreover, we propose the Class Center Contrast method to jointly utilize the labeled and unlabeled data. Specifically, we decompose the feature embedding space using the ground truth and pseudo-labels, and employ the embedding centers for hard and easy samples of each class per image in the contrast loss to exploit the hard samples during training. Compared with state-of-the-art class-balanced pseudo-labeling methods, the proposed method improves the mean accuracy and mIoU by 4.28% and 1.70%, respectively, on the large-scale Sentinel-2 dataset with 24 land cover classes.

High-resolution land cover mapping (LCM) is an important application for studying and understanding the change of the earth surface. While deep learning (DL) methods demonstrate great potential in analyzing satellite images, they largely depend on massive high-quality labels. This paper proposes SW-LCM, a Scalable and Weakly-supervised two-stage Land Cover Mapping method on a new Sunway Supercomputer. Our method consists of a k-means clustering module as a first stage, and an iterative deep learning module as a second stage. With the k-means module providing a good enough starting point (taking inaccurate results as noisy labels), the deep learning module improves the classification results in an iterative way, without any labelling efforts required for processing large scenarios. To achieve efficiency for country-level land cover mapping, we design a customized data partition scheme and an on-the-fly assembly for k-means. Through careful parallelization and optimization, our k-means module scales to 98,304 computing nodes (over 38 million cores), and provides a sustained performance of 437.56 PFLOPS, in a real LCM task of the entire region of China; the iterative updating part scales to 24,576 nodes, with a performance of 11 PFLOPS. We produce a 10-m resolution land cover map of China, with an accuracy of 83.5% (10-class) or 73.2% (25-class), 7% to 8% higher than best existing products, paving ways for finer land surveys to support sustainability-related applications.

Although domain adaptation approaches have been proposed to tackle cross-regional, multitemporal, and multisensor remote sensing applications since they do not require any human interpretation in the target domain, most current works assume identical label space across the source and the target domains. However, in real-world applications, we often transfer knowledge from a large-scale dataset with rich annotations to a small-scale target dataset with scarcity of labels. In most cases, the label space of the source domain is usually large enough to subsume that of the target domain, which is termed partial domain adaptation. In this article, we propose a new partial domain adaptation algorithm for remote sensing scene classification and our proposed method contains three major parts. First, we employ a progressive auxiliary domain module to alleviate the negative transfer effect caused by outlier classes. Second, we adopt an improved domain adversarial neural network (DANN) with multiweights to better encourage domain confusion. Last but not least, we design an attentive complement entropy regularization to improve the prediction confidence for samples and avoid untransferable samples (such as the samples belonging to outlier classes in the source domain) being mistakenly classified. We collect three common remote sensing datasets to evaluate our proposed method. Our method achieves an average accuracy of 79.36%, which considerably outperforms other state-of-the-art partial domain adaptation methods with an average accuracy improvement of 1.90%–12.45% and attaining a 13.67% gain compared to the straightforward deep learning model (ResNet-50). The experiment results indicate that our approach shows promising prospects for solving more general and practical domain adaptation problems where the label space of the source domain subsumes that of the target domain.