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Humans excel at abstracting data and constructing \emph{reusable} concepts, a capability lacking in current continual learning systems. The field of object-centric learning addresses this by developing abstract representations, or slots, from data without human supervision. Different methods have been proposed to tackle this task for images, whereas most are overly complex, non-differentiable, or poorly scalable. In this paper, we introduce a conceptually simple, fully-differentiable, non-iterative, and scalable method called SAMP Simplified Slot Attention with Max Pool Priors). It is implementable using only Convolution and MaxPool layers and an Attention layer. Our method encodes the input image with a Convolutional Neural Network and then uses a branch of alternating Convolution and MaxPool layers to create specialized sub-networks and extract primitive slots. These primitive slots are then used as queries for a Simplified Slot Attention over the encoded image. Despite its simplicity, our method is competitive or outperforms previous methods on standard benchmarks.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical when deploying machine learning models in the real world. Outlier exposure methods, which incorporate auxiliary outlier data in the training process, can drastically improve OOD detection performance compared to approaches without advanced training strategies. We introduce Hopfield Boosting, a boosting approach, which leverages modern Hopfield energy (MHE) to sharpen the decision boundary between the in-distribution and OOD data. Hopfield Boosting encourages the model to concentrate on hard-to-distinguish auxiliary outlier examples that lie close to the decision boundary between in-distribution and auxiliary outlier data. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art in OOD detection with outlier exposure, improving the FPR95 metric from 2.28 to 0.92 on CIFAR-10 and from 11.76 to 7.94 on CIFAR-100.

Floods are one of the most common natural disasters, with a disproportionate impact in developing countries that often lack dense streamflow gauge networks. Accurate and timely warnings are critical for mitigating flood risks, but hydrological simulation models typically must be calibrated to long data records in each watershed. Using AI, we achieve reliability in predicting extreme riverine events in ungauged watersheds at up to a 5-day lead time that is similar to or better than the reliability of nowcasts (0-day lead time) from a current state of the art global modeling system (the Copernicus Emergency Management Service Global Flood Awareness System). Additionally, we achieve accuracies over 5-year return period events that are similar to or better than current accuracies over 1-year return period events. This means that AI can provide flood warnings earlier and over larger and more impactful events in ungauged basins. The model developed in this paper was incorporated into an operational early warning system that produces publicly available (free and open) forecasts in real time in over 80 countries. This work highlights a need for increasing the availability of hydrological data to continue to improve global access to reliable flood warnings.

To quantify uncertainty, conformal prediction methods are gaining continuously more interest and have already been successfully applied to various domains. However, they are difficult to apply to time series as the autocorrelative structure of time series violates basic assumptions required by conformal prediction. We propose HopCPT, a novel conformal prediction approach for time series that not only copes with temporal structures but leverages them. We show that our approach is theoretically well justified for time series where temporal dependencies are present. In experiments, we demonstrate that our new approach outperforms state-of-the-art conformal prediction methods on multiple real-world time series datasets from four different domains., Comment: presented at NeurIPS 2023

We introduce SubGD, a novel few-shot learning method which is based on the recent finding that stochastic gradient descent updates tend to live in a low-dimensional parameter subspace. In experimental and theoretical analyses, we show that models confined to a suitable predefined subspace generalize well for few-shot learning. A suitable subspace fulfills three criteria across the given tasks: it (a) allows to reduce the training error by gradient flow, (b) leads to models that generalize well, and (c) can be identified by stochastic gradient descent. SubGD identifies these subspaces from an eigendecomposition of the auto-correlation matrix of update directions across different tasks. Demonstrably, we can identify low-dimensional suitable subspaces for few-shot learning of dynamical systems, which have varying properties described by one or few parameters of the analytical system description. Such systems are ubiquitous among real-world applications in science and engineering. We experimentally corroborate the advantages of SubGD on three distinct dynamical systems problem settings, significantly outperforming popular few-shot learning methods both in terms of sample efficiency and performance., Comment: Accepted at Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents (CoLLAs) 2022. Code: https://github.com/ml-jku/subgd Blog post: https://ml-jku.github.io/subgd

The success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision is mainly driven by their strong inductive bias, which is strong enough to allow CNNs to solve vision-related tasks with random weights, meaning without learning. Similarly, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) has a strong inductive bias towards storing information over time. However, many real-world systems are governed by conservation laws, which lead to the redistribution of particular quantities -- e.g. in physical and economical systems. Our novel Mass-Conserving LSTM (MC-LSTM) adheres to these conservation laws by extending the inductive bias of LSTM to model the redistribution of those stored quantities. MC-LSTMs set a new state-of-the-art for neural arithmetic units at learning arithmetic operations, such as addition tasks, which have a strong conservation law, as the sum is constant over time. Further, MC-LSTM is applied to traffic forecasting, modelling a pendulum, and a large benchmark dataset in hydrology, where it sets a new state-of-the-art for predicting peak flows. In the hydrology example, we show that MC-LSTM states correlate with real-world processes and are therefore interpretable., Comment: 13 pages (8.5 without references) + 17 pages appendix

Deep Learning is becoming an increasingly important way to produce accurate hydrological predictions across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Uncertainty estimations are critical for actionable hydrological forecasting, and while standardized community benchmarks are becoming an increasingly important part of hydrological model development and research, similar tools for benchmarking uncertainty estimation are lacking. We establish an uncertainty estimation benchmarking procedure and present four Deep Learning baselines, out of which three are based on Mixture Density Networks and one is based on Monte Carlo dropout. Additionally, we provide a post-hoc model analysis to put forward some qualitative understanding of the resulting models. Most importantly however, we show that accurate, precise, and reliable uncertainty estimation can be achieved with Deep Learning., Comment: 32 pages, 11 figures

Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) have been applied to daily discharge prediction with remarkable success. Many practical scenarios, however, require predictions at more granular timescales. For instance, accurate prediction of short but extreme flood peaks can make a life-saving difference, yet such peaks may escape the coarse temporal resolution of daily predictions. Naively training an LSTM on hourly data, however, entails very long input sequences that make learning hard and computationally expensive. In this study, we propose two Multi-Timescale LSTM (MTS-LSTM) architectures that jointly predict multiple timescales within one model, as they process long-past inputs at a single temporal resolution and branch out into each individual timescale for more recent input steps. We test these models on 516 basins across the continental United States and benchmark against the US National Water Model. Compared to naive prediction with a distinct LSTM per timescale, the multi-timescale architectures are computationally more efficient with no loss in accuracy. Beyond prediction quality, the multi-timescale LSTM can process different input variables at different timescales, which is especially relevant to operational applications where the lead time of meteorological forcings depends on their temporal resolution.

Joint models are a common and important tool in the intersection of machine learning and the physical sciences, particularly in contexts where real-world measurements are scarce. Recent developments in rainfall-runoff modeling, one of the prime challenges in hydrology, show the value of a joint model with shared representation in this important context. However, current state-of-the-art models depend on detailed and reliable attributes characterizing each site to help the model differentiate correctly between the behavior of different sites. This dependency can present a challenge in data-poor regions. In this paper, we show that we can replace the need for such location-specific attributes with a completely data-driven learned embedding, and match previous state-of-the-art results with less information.

Climate change affects occurrences of floods and droughts worldwide. However, predicting climate impacts over individual watersheds is difficult, primarily because accurate hydrological forecasts require models that are calibrated to past data. In this work we present a large-scale LSTM-based modeling approach that -- by training on large data sets -- learns a diversity of hydrological behaviors. Previous work shows that this model is more accurate than current state-of-the-art models, even when the LSTM-based approach operates out-of-sample and the latter in-sample. In this work, we show how this model can assess the sensitivity of the underlying systems with regard to extreme (high and low) flows in individual watersheds over the continental US.

Regional rainfall-runoff modeling is an old but still mostly out-standing problem in Hydrological Sciences. The problem currently is that traditional hydrological models degrade significantly in performance when calibrated for multiple basins together instead of for a single basin alone. In this paper, we propose a novel, data-driven approach using Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs), and demonstrate that under a 'big data' paradigm, this is not necessarily the case. By training a single LSTM model on 531 basins from the CAMELS data set using meteorological time series data and static catchment attributes, we were able to significantly improve performance compared to a set of several different hydrological benchmark models. Our proposed approach not only significantly outperforms hydrological models that were calibrated regionally but also achieves better performance than hydrological models that were calibrated for each basin individually. Furthermore, we propose an adaption to the standard LSTM architecture, which we call an Entity-Aware-LSTM (EA-LSTM), that allows for learning, and embedding as a feature layer in a deep learning model, catchment similarities. We show that this learned catchment similarity corresponds well with what we would expect from prior hydrological understanding.

Despite the huge success of Long Short-Term Memory networks, their applications in environmental sciences are scarce. We argue that one reason is the difficulty to interpret the internals of trained networks. In this study, we look at the application of LSTMs for rainfall-runoff forecasting, one of the central tasks in the field of hydrology, in which the river discharge has to be predicted from meteorological observations. LSTMs are particularly well-suited for this problem since memory cells can represent dynamic reservoirs and storages, which are essential components in state-space modelling approaches of the hydrological system. On basis of two different catchments, one with snow influence and one without, we demonstrate how the trained model can be analyzed and interpreted. In the process, we show that the network internally learns to represent patterns that are consistent with our qualitative understanding of the hydrological system., Comment: Pre-print of published book chapter. See journal reference and DOI for more info