Soft Contrastive Representation Learning for Cloud-Particle Images Captured In-Flight by the New HVPS-4 Airborne Probe
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cloud properties underpin accurate climate modeling and are often derived from the individual particles comprising a cloud. Studying these cloud particles is challenging due to their intricate shapes, called “habits,” and manual classification via probe-generated images is time-consuming and subjective. We propose a novel method for habit representation learning that uses minimal labeled data by leveraging self-supervised learning (SSL) with Vision Transformers (ViTs) on a newly acquired dataset of 124000 images captured by the novel high-volume precipitation spectrometer ver. 4 (HVPS-4) probe. Our approach significantly outperforms ImageNet pretraining by 48% on a 293-sample annotated dataset. Notably, we present the first SSL scheme for learning habit representations, leveraging data collected in flight from the probe. Our results demonstrate that self-supervised pretraining significantly improves habit classification even when using single-channel HVPS-4 data. We achieve further gains using sequential views and a soft contrastive objective tailored for sequential, in-flight measurements. Our work paves the way for applying SSL to multiview and multiscale data from advanced cloud-particle imaging probes, enabling comprehensive characterization of the flight environment. We publicly release data, code, and models associated with this study.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it