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Efficient soil sampling is essential for effective soil management and research on soil health. Traditional site selection methods are labor-intensive and fail to capture soil variability comprehensively. This study introduces a deep learning-based tool that automates soil sampling site selection using spectral images. The proposed framework consists of two key components: an extractor and a predictor. The extractor, based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), derives features from spectral images, while the predictor employs self-attention mechanisms to assess feature importance and generate prediction maps. The model is designed to process multiple spectral images and address the class imbalance in soil segmentation. The model was trained on a soil dataset from 20 fields in eastern South Dakota, collected via drone-mounted LiDAR with high-precision GPS. Evaluation on a test set achieved a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 69.46 % and a mean Dice coefficient (mDc) of 80.35 %, demonstrating strong segmentation performance. The results highlight the model's effectiveness in automating soil sampling site selection, providing an advanced tool for producers and soil scientists. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach improves accuracy and efficiency, optimizing soil sampling processes and enhancing soil research. 

Although recent advances in machine learning have shown its success to learn from independent and identically distributed (IID) data, it is vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) data in an open world. Domain generalization (DG) deals with such an issue and it aims to learn a model from multiple source domains that can be generalized to unseen target domains. Existing studies on DG have largely focused on stationary settings with homogeneous source domains. However, in many applications, domains may evolve along a specific direction (e.g., time, space). Without accounting for such non-stationary patterns, models trained with existing methods may fail to generalize on OOD data. In this paper, we study domain generalization in non-stationary environment. We first examine the impact of environmental non-stationarity on model performance and establish the theoretical upper bounds for the model error at target domains. Then, we propose a novel algorithm based on adaptive invariant representation learning, which leverages the non-stationary pattern to train a model that attains good performance on target domains. Experiments on both synthetic and real data validate the proposed algorithm.