arXiv AI

CoST: Semantic-Aware Urban Understanding via Spatial-Temporal Alignment

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

GTPred: Benchmarking MLLMs for Interpretable Geo-localization and Time-of-capture Prediction

GTPred is a new benchmark for geo‑temporal prediction that evaluates multi‑modal large language models (MLLMs) on 370 images taken across 120 years worldwide. It assesses predictions by matching both the year and a hierarchical location sequence, and includes annotated reasoning chains to test intermediate reasoning. Experiments on 15 MLLMs show that while visual perception is strong, models still lack world knowledge and geo‑temporal reasoning, and that adding temporal data improves location inference.

By Jinnao Li, Tingzhu Chen, Changbo Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 9

CarbonCLIP: Enhance Carbon Prediction from Satellite Imagery via Integrated Street-View Semantics and Temporal Context Training

arXiv:2607. 07292v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately estimating urban carbon emissions is critical for sustainable urban planning, yet many existing approaches remain difficult to apply consistently across cities due to data-source heterogeneity and the lack of fine-grained semantic-temporal context in remote sensing data.

By Zeru Yang, Fang-Ying Gong, Steve H. L. Yim, Chau Yuen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

MoRAX: Mobility-based Representation Augmentation for Geospatial Foundation Models

MoRAX is a lightweight framework that augments geospatial foundation model embeddings with functional structure derived from human mobility data. By incorporating mobility flows, MoRAX preserves the coverage and consistency of existing geospatial models while adding information about functional connectivity among urban regions, enabling zero‑shot deployment in unseen cities. Experiments across four cities in two countries show that the MoRAX teacher model outperforms baseline geospatial models on eight socioeconomic and environmental prediction tasks, and the student model—without direct mobility input—approaches the teacher’s performance.

By Ya Wen, Jixuan Cai, Yulun Zhou, Alec Kirkley
arXiv AI
Aug 19

MoRA: Mobility as the Backbone for Geospatial Representation Learning at Scale

MoRA is a human‑centric geospatial representation learning framework that uses a large mobility graph as its backbone to fuse spatial tokenization, graph neural networks, and asymmetric contrastive learning. It aligns over 100 million points of interest, massive remote sensing imagery, and structured demographic data with a billion‑edge mobility graph, producing compact 128‑dimensional embeddings that capture socio‑economic context and functional roles of locations. On a benchmark of nine downstream social and economic prediction tasks, MoRA outperforms state‑of‑the‑art models by an average of 12.9% and demonstrates scaling behavior analogous to large language models.

By Ya Wen, Jixuan Cai, Qiyao Ma, Linyan Li, Xinhua Chen, Chris Webster, Yulun Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

BEACON: Behavioral and Semantic Enrichment of AlphaEarth Embeddings through Tri-Modal Contrastive Learning

BEACON is a tri‑modal contrastive learning framework that enriches AlphaEarth embeddings by aligning physical representations from Earth‑observation imagery with semantic POI text and human behavioral POI visitation data, while keeping the deployed model image‑only. In a Houston case study, BEACON outperformed six baselines on nine downstream tasks, achieving up to 43% higher R² for obesity prevalence, 34% for poor mental health, and 22% for median household income under a linear probe.

By Hao Tian, Heng Cai, Yifan Yang