Update README.md

README.md

@@ -9,4 +9,12 @@ metrics:
 tags:
 - weather,
 - agriculture,
----
+---
+
+# VITA: Variational Pretraining of Transformers for Climate-Robust Crop Yield Forecasting
+
+This is the official pretrained model weights for the paper [arXiv:2508.03589](https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03589) to be presented in **AAAI 2026**. VITA is a variational pretraining framework that learns weather representations from rich satellite data and transfers them to yield prediction tasks with limited ground-based measurements.
+
+## Overview
+
+VITA addresses the data asymmetry problem in agricultural AI: pretraining uses 31 meteorological variables from NASA POWER satellite data, while deployment relies on only 6 basic weather features. Through variational pretraining with a seasonality-aware sinusoidal prior, VITA achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting corn and soybean yields across 763 U.S. Corn Belt counties, particularly during extreme weather years.