Edinburgh & ESA build COP-GEN, a latent diffusion model that treats Earth observation as a distribution, not a single prediction
anselm · x · 2026-09-09
Researchers from Edinburgh and ESA present COP-GEN, a multimodal latent diffusion model addressing a flaw in Earth observation: most models are deterministic, mapping a DEM and land-cover map to a single "most likely" optical image. But the same terrain can plausibly look very different depending on cloud cover, season, soil moisture, and atmospheric scattering — the correct answer is a distribution, not one image.
COP-GEN is built to model that distribution of plausible outcomes rather than collapse it to its mean, and the authors argue this probabilistic shift matters far more than it sounds.
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