arXiv AI By Ciro Beneduce, Massimiliano Luca, Bruno Lepri

AI's Blind Spots: Geographic Knowledge and Diversity Deficit in Generated Urban Scenario

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arXiv:2506. 16898v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based text-to-image models are increasingly used for urban analysis and scenario generation, but their geographic knowledge and representational biases remain poorly understood.

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arXiv AI
Jun 8

Textual Supervision Enhances Geospatial Representations in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 07172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Geospatial understanding is a critical yet underexplored dimension in the development of machine learning systems for tasks such as image geolocation and spatial reasoning.

By Marcelo Sartori Locatelli, Fernando Tonucci, Jea Kwon, Luiz Felipe Vecchietti, Bryan Nathanael Wijaya, Cheng Yaw Low, Virgilio Almeida, Meeyoung Cha
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