Long-sequence precipitation forecasting is critical for both meteorological science and smart city applications. The primary objective of this task is to predict future radar echo sequences, which provide high resolution and timely references for atmospheric precipitation distribution based on current observations. However, the chaotic nature of precipitation systems poses significant challenges in extending reliable forecast horizons. Most existing methods struggle with accuracy and clarity when extended to long-sequence predictions, such as three-hour forecasts. This is primarily due to the insufficiency of spatio-temporal information within a single modality over time. In this paper, we propose a cascading forecasting framework that adaptively extracts and integrates multimodal spatio-temporal information to support accurate and realistic long-sequence radar forecasting. Our framework includes a temporal adaptive predictor and a flow-based precipitation distribution adaptor. The predictor utilizes a multi-branch encoder-decoder architecture. This design allows it to extract meteorological sequences from multiple sources at varying scales, resulting in an initial global precipitation estimate. The core component is a carefully designed cross-attention module with a temporal adaptive layer to enhance multi-modality alignment. The initial estimate is then refined by the flow-based adaptor, which adjusts the prediction to match the target precipitation distribution, enhancing local details and correcting extreme precipitation patterns. We validated our method using real multi-source dataset for long-sequence forecasting, and the experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Precipitation nowcasting involves using current radar observation sequences to predict future radar sequences and determine future precipitation distribution, which is crucial for disaster warning, traffic planning, and agricultural production. Despite numerous advancements, challenges persist in accurately predicting both the location and intensity of precipitation, as these factors are often interdependent, with complex atmospheric dynamics and moisture distribution causing position and intensity changes to be intricately coupled. Inspired by the fact that in the frequency domain, phase variations are shown to correspond to changes in the position of precipitation, while amplitude variations are linked to intensity changes, we propose an amplitude-phase disentanglement model called AlphaPre, which separately learn the position and intensity changes of precipitation. AlphaPre comprises three key components: a phase network, an amplitude network, and an AlphaMixer. The phase network captures positional changes by learning phase variations, and the amplitude network models intensity changes by alternating between the frequency and spatial domains. The AlphaMixer then integrates these components to produce a refined precipitation forecast. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method over state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/linkenghong/AlphaPre.

Most current precipitation nowcasting methods aim to capture the underlying spatiotemporal dynamics of precipitation systems by minimizing the mean square error (MSE). However, these methods often neglect effective constraints on the data distribution, leading to unsatisfactory prediction accuracy and image quality, especially for long forecast sequences. To address this limitation, we propose a precipitation nowcasting model incorporating perceptual constraints. This model reformulates precipitation nowcasting as a posterior MSE problem under such constraints. Specifically, we first obtain the posteriori mean sequences of precipitation forecasts using a precipitation estimator. Subsequently, we construct the transmission between distributions using rectified flow. To enhance the focus on distant frames, we design a frame sampling strategy that gradually increases the corresponding weights. We theoretically demonstrate the reliability of our solution, and experimental results on two publicly available radar datasets demonstrate that our model is effective and outperforms current state-of-the-art models.

Precipitation nowcasting plays a pivotal role in urban planning and disaster mitigation, where extending forecast horizons offers critical advantages for proactive decision-making. Most data-driven methods focus on modeling radar echo sequences through end-to-end spatiotemporal predictive learning, yielding precise short-term predictions; however, they fundamentally neglect the inherent physical mechanism governing precipitation system. Moreover, approaches relying solely on single-modality radar observations suffer from persistent information bottlenecks, severely limiting their temporal generalizability for extended forecasting. To address these challenges, we propose PiMMNet, a Physics-informed Multi-Modal Network. It is constructed based on the advection-diffusion principle from fluid dynamics, explicitly modeling the precipitation evolution as a spatiotemporal transport processes characterized by the deterministic advection and the stochastic source. We carefully design a multi-model motion estimation network and a motion-guided diffusion model to describe the deterministic and stochastic terms, respectively. The core innovation of our method lies in jointly estimating a physics-constrained velocity field from multi-modal inputs (radar and satellite data). In this case, we naturally align the motion evolution among modalities into a unified representation, inherently mitigating cross-modal distribution biases. Experimental evaluations on two real-world multi-modal meteorological datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, showcasing significant improvements in accuracy and robustness for longer-range precipitation nowcasting. Our code are available at https://github.com/DeminYu98/PiMMNet.

Equipping a deep model the ability of few-shot learning (FSL) is a core challenge for artificial intelligence. Gradient-based meta-learning effectively addresses the challenge by learning how to learn novel tasks. Its key idea is learning a deep model in a bi-level optimization manner, where the outer-loop process learns a shared gradient descent algorithm (called meta-optimizer), while the inner-loop process leverages it to optimize a task-specific base learner with few examples. Although these methods have shown superior performance on FSL, the outer-loop process requires calculating second-order derivatives along the inner-loop path, which imposes considerable memory burdens and the risk of vanishing gradients. This degrades meta-learning performance. Inspired by recent diffusion models, we find that the inner-loop gradient descent process can be viewed as a reverse process (i.e., denoising) of diffusion where the target of denoising is the weight of base learner but origin data. Based on this fact, we propose to model the gradient descent algorithm as a diffusion model and then present a novel conditional diffusion-based meta-learning, called MetaDiff, that effectively models the optimization process of base learner weights from Gaussian initialization to target weights in a denoising manner. Thanks to the training efficiency of diffusion models, our MetaDiff does not need to differentiate through the inner-loop path such that the memory burdens and the risk of vanishing gradients can be effectively alleviated for improving FSL. Experimental results show that our MetaDiff outperforms state-of-the-art gradient-based meta-learning family on FSL tasks.

Precipitation nowcasting is an important spatiotemporal prediction task to predict the radar echoes sequences based on current observations, which can serve both meteorological science and smart city applications. Due to the chaotic evolution nature of the precipitation systems, it is a very challenging problem. Previous studies address the problem either from the perspectives of deterministic modeling or probabilistic modeling. However, their predictions suffer from the blurry, high-value echoes fading away and position inaccurate issues. The root reason of these issues is that the chaotic evolutionary precipitation systems are not appropriately modeled. Inspired by the nature of the systems, we propose to decompose and model them from the perspective of global deterministic motion and local stochastic variations with residual mechanism. A unified and flexible framework that can equip any type of spatio-temporal models is proposed based on residual diffusion, which effectively tackles the shortcomings of previous methods. Extensive experimental results on four publicly available radar datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework, compared to state-of-the-art techniques. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/DeminYu98/DiffCast.

With the widespread use of Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) in people’s daily lives, research on conversational recommender systems (CRSs) has become a hot topic in services computing. A key challenge is to reduce search space of candidate services for providing satisfying recommendations in fewer dialogue rounds. Firstly, user portraits are used to record long-term user preferences for assisting personalized recommendations; however, traditional label-based user portraits cannot reach at higher precision of quantified preferences and higher timeliness of preference updates along with time. For this challenge, this paper imports Multi-domain Dialogue-based User Portrait (MDUP) model to record multi-domain numerical preferences and continuously accumulates long-term preference updates, so that candidate services can be matched more precisely. Secondly, recommender systems usually compose massive services from multiple domains to meet coarse-grained user needs, and in order to improve the search, filtering and sorting efficiency of services during dialogue, this paper models potential connections among services of different domains by introducing service feature dependency to effectively compress the scale of candidate services. Combined the two perspectives together, this paper proposes a new service pre-sorting algorithm and a novel dialogue policy (intra-domain feedback-based iteration and inter-domain backtracking), then introduces architecture and working process of a novel service recommendation VPA (srVPA). Experiment demonstrates that compared with existing CRSs, the importation of MDUP and service feature dependency into srVPA significantly improve dialogue efficiency and user satisfaction on recommendation results.