# Inductive biases in deep learning models for weather prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.04664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04664/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 146 of its 284 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 146)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DYffusion: A Dynamics-informed Diffusion Model for Spatiotemporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01984/) (2023)
- [Advancing Parsimonious Deep Learning Weather Prediction using the HEALPix Mesh](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06253/) (2023)
- [Advancing Meteorological Forecasting: AI-based Approach to Synoptic Weather Map Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05384/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning has gained immense popularity in the Earth sciences as it enables us to formulate purely data-driven models of complex Earth system processes. Deep learning-based weather prediction (DLWP) models have made significant progress in the last few years, achieving forecast skills comparable to established numerical weather prediction models with comparatively lesser computational costs. In order to train accurate, reliable, and tractable DLWP models with several millions of parameters, the model design needs to incorporate suitable inductive biases that encode structural assumptions about the data and the modelled processes. When chosen appropriately, these biases enable faster learning and better generalisation to unseen data. Although inductive biases play a crucial role in successful DLWP models, they are often not stated explicitly and their contribution to model performance remains unclear. Here, we review and analyse the inductive biases of state-of-the-art DLWP models with respect to five key design elements: data selection, learning objective, loss function, architecture, and optimisation method. We identify the most important inductive biases and highlight potential avenues towards more efficient and probabilistic DLWP models.