arXiv:2607. 22613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores the intersection of memory, place, and identity, examining how new technologies, particularly Apple Vision Pro, can illuminate this nexus.
arXiv:2505. 02271v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The proliferation of Generative Artificial Ingelligence (AI), especially Large Language Models, presents transformative opportunities for urban applications through Urban Foundation Models.
arXiv:2609.15833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cultural heritage documentation increasingly relies on image-based 3D surface reconstruction, with photogrammetry software making such workflows access...
arXiv:2602.10124v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cycling is reported by an average of 35% of adults at least once per week across 28 countries, and as vulnerable road users directly exposed...
arXiv:2605. 16972v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cultural heritage exhibitions often struggle to sustain attention and support reflective engagement.
The paper presents a multimodal machine learning framework that classifies Emirati residential architectural styles by combining visual features from images and textual descriptions using OpenAI's CLIP model. The unified 512‑dimensional embeddings are reduced with UMAP, clustered with K‑Means, and then used to train an SVM classifier, achieving a 98% accuracy across eight style clusters. This approach outperforms previous studies and demonstrates the value of integrating visual and textual data for cultural heritage analysis.
arXiv:2608. 08814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present 360CityArena, a benchmark for evaluating the urban exploration capabilities of embodied agents within a photorealistic environment constructed from 360-degree videos.
Vision‑language models used to gauge urban change from repeated street‑level images exhibit limited reliability at single locations. In a study of 4,648 image pairs from 435 Google Street View points across five U.S. cities, re‑photographing the same street altered perception scores by an average of 0.80 points—about two‑thirds of the difference between distinct streets—while repeated model calls added negligible variation. Although image re‑encoding, prompt order, and various image statistics contributed modestly, a small systematic drift (~0.1 points) persisted and grew with time between captures, suggesting minor unrecorded physical changes. Controlled experiments revealed that varying camera and image properties can shift scores, and that camera geometry alone caused a model to falsely report change in 45% of identical scenes; normalising to a common virtual camera reduced this to 7.5%. Despite these individual‑point unreliabilities, aggregating many paired observations recovers a clear redevelopment signal, indicating that such models are dependable at large scales but not for single‑location assessments.
PlaceSeek is a human‑centered geospatial retrieval framework that maps natural‑language queries to street‑view images by decomposing queries into functional and affective sub‑intents. It uses a Semantic Grounding Module to verify that candidate images contain the physical evidence needed for the intended activity, and an Affective Alignment Module to re‑rank these candidates based on human urban perception judgments. Evaluated on 31,956 Milan street‑view locations, PlaceSeek achieves high precision and ranking metrics, outperforming several vision‑language baselines and demonstrating the importance of both physical grounding and affective alignment for complex urban spatial queries.
arXiv:2601. 06056v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: During 2025 and 2026, the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive is being implemented in the European Union member states, requiring all member states to have National Building Renovation Plans.
arXiv:2608.05879v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text-driven 3D generation has advanced rapidly in creating large-scale outdoor environments and detailed indoor scenes, but these domains are usual...
We introduce ChinaHeritaQA, a multimodal benchmark dataset for evaluating the cultural reasoning abilities of vision-language models (VLMs) on UNESCO World Heritage sites in China. The dataset comprises 2,279 in-the-wild images paired with 14,133 bilingual (Chinese/English) multiple-choice QA pairs spanning seven cognitive dimensions, from basic identity recognition to historical periodization and architectural analysis.
The Living Library is an end‑to‑end framework that converts fragmented digital archives into governed, conversational exhibit experiences. Developed at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, it digitizes a 300,000‑record collection, enriches it with OCR and metadata, and publishes it to a hybrid dense/semantic index. The system supports curator review via the Archivist App, powers a researcher interface, and runs Talk to TR—a museum exhibit where a digital human embodiment of Theodore Roosevelt answers visitors’ questions using Cross‑Era Analogical Grounding and dual‑path retrieval to keep responses grounded and responsive.