现有气候模型在气候变化下会失效,新方法用季节变化模拟未来分布提升可靠性。
No Epoch Like the Present: Robust Climate Emulation Requires Out-of-Distribution Generalisation

- 用季节变化替代人为扰动,真实模拟气候分布迁移
- 当前先进混合模型在分布外场景性能大幅下降
- 物理分解结构可显著提升对未知未来的泛化能力
气候模拟本质上是分布外(OOD)预测任务,而现代机器学习在此类场景中极易失效。尽管当前基于当前气候训练的机器学习模拟器在原分布内表现优异,但其在未来气候分布偏移下的可靠性仍是个关键且未被充分理解的盲点。本文首先确认气候变化导致大气状态分布发生统计显著且持续加剧的偏移,使传统评估方法失效。我们实证发现季节变化可有效作为长期气候变迁的代理,无需依赖合成扰动等启发式方法即可获得真实分布偏移。基于此,我们提出一种新颖评估框架,利用季节性变化作为严格、零成本的鲁棒性测试平台。系统分析表明,当前最先进的混合机器学习模拟器在这些真实分布偏移下性能显著退化。最后,我们提出通过组合泛化——即从已知基本组件构建新组合的能力——实现稳健气候模拟的可行路径。结果表明,基于物理动机的分解结构能显著提升分布外性能,仅付出微小的分布内性能代价,为构建面向未知未来的机器学习驱动气候模拟器提供了新方向。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Climate emulation is an out-of-distribution (OOD) projection task. This is precisely the challenge where modern Machine Learning (ML) methods are most prone to failure. Consequently, while current ML emulators trained on present climate achieve high in-distribution performance, their future reliability under the inevitable distribution shifts of a changing climate remains a critical, poorly understood blind spot. Addressing this challenge requires a fundamental shift in how we understand, evaluate, and design climate emulators. In this work, we first confirm that climate change drives a statistically significant and progressively growing shift in atmospheric state distributions, rendering standard evaluation protocols insufficient. We empirically establish that seasonal variation serves as an effective proxy for these long-term climate shifts, providing access to $\textit{real-world}$ distribution shifts without recourse to heuristics like synthetic perturbations. Motivated by this link, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that leverages seasonal shifts as a rigorous, zero-overhead testbed for emulator robustness. Our systematic characterisation confirms that current state-of-the-art hybrid-ML emulators degrade significantly under these realistic shifts. Finally, we chart a path forward by identifying compositional generalisation, the ability to form novel combinations from observed elementary components, as a principled route towards robust climate emulation. We demonstrate that physically motivated decompositions substantially improve OOD performance with only modest trade-offs against in-distribution performance, providing an avenue towards ML-driven climate emulators robust to an unknown future.
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