(Sparse) Attention to the Details: Preserving Spectral Fidelity in ML-based Weather Forecasting Models

2026-05-13 19:00 GMT · 2 months ago aimagpro.com

arXiv:2604.16429v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We introduce Mosaic, a probabilistic weather forecasting model that addresses two distinct failure modes of spectral degradation in ML-based weather prediction: (1) spectral damping caused by deterministic training against ensemble means; and (2) aliasing artifacts caused by compressive encoding onto a coarse latent grid. Mosaic generates ensemble members through learned functional perturbations and operates on native-resolution grids via mesh-aligned block-sparse attention, a hardware-aligned mechanism that captures long-range dependencies at linear cost by sharing keys and values across spatially adjacent queries. At 1.5{deg} resolution with 214M parameters, Mosaic matches or outperforms models trained on 6$times$ finer resolution on key variables and achieves state-of-the-art results among 1.5{deg} models, producing well-calibrated ensembles whose individual members exhibit near-perfect spectral alignment across all resolved frequencies. A 24-member, 10-day forecast takes under 12,s on a single H100~GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/maxxxzdn/mosaic.