通过自校准首步输出,抑制天气预测中误差累积的蝴蝶效应。
Nipping the Butterfly Effect in the Bud: Self-Output Fine-Tuning for Autoregressive Weather Prediction

- 用模型自身预测结果校正初始输入分布偏差。
- 在长期预报任务上显著降低误差和分布偏移。
- 方法简单通用,适合长时序气象建模研究者。
长时间天气预测是大气科学的核心挑战,自回归深度学习天气预测(DLWP)已成为主流范式。尽管该流程高度可扩展且灵活,但预测误差随时间迅速增长。本文从理论与实证双重视角分析此现象,发现误差增长源于输出误差与输入分布偏移之间的反馈循环:微小初始误差在自回归过程中被放大,逐步污染后续输入分布,如同大气科学中的蝴蝶效应,最终导致长期预报精度下降。进一步研究表明,这种分布偏移始于推理初期,在首个自回归步骤即出现分布外特征。为此,我们提出「自输出微调(SOFT)」策略,一种即插即用的方法,利用模型自身一步预测结果校准初始阶段遇到的偏差输入分布。大量实验表明,尽管方法简洁,SOFT在长期预报任务上达到当前最优性能,显著减少预测误差与分布差异。SOFT的成功凸显了重新审视深度学习天气预测基础流程的重要性,为大气科学带来关键性流程改进。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Long-horizon weather forecasting is a fundamental challenge in atmospheric science, for which autoregressive Deep Learning Weather Prediction (DLWP) has emerged as the primary paradigm. Although the autoregressive pipeline is highly scalable and flexible, its prediction errors grow rapidly over long forecasting horizons. In this work, we study this error growth phenomenon from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Our analysis reveals that the growth is driven by a feedback loop between output errors and input distribution shifts. Specifically, the autoregressive process amplifies small initial output errors, which progressively corrupt subsequent input distributions, echoing the butterfly effect in atmospheric science and ultimately deteriorating forecasting accuracy over longer horizons. Furthermore, we show that this distributional shift originates at the earliest stage of inference, with out-of-distribution signatures detectable as early as the first autoregressive step. To mitigate this issue, we propose \textbf{Self-Output Fine-Tuning (SOFT)}, a plug-and-play strategy that leverages the model's own one-step predictions to calibrate the biased input distribution encountered at the first step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, despite its simplicity, SOFT achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-horizon forecasting tasks and substantially reduces both prediction errors and distributional discrepancy. The success of SOFT highlights the importance of reexamining the fundamental pipeline of deep learning weather prediction, representing a critical pipeline advance for atmospheric science.
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