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
arXiv:2610.15403v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Crowdsourced disaster imagery provides timely, ground-level observations when conventional disaster mapping is delayed or incomplete, yet its geographi...
By Hao Li, Wenping Yin, Fabian Deuser, Jia Jia, Ziqi Liu, Levente Juh\'asz, Fan Zhang, Filip Biljecki
arXiv:2606.08918v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Worldwide image geo-localization aims to determine where on Earth a single image was captured. However, visually similar scenes may lie thousands o...
By Junchao Cui, Xuanzi Ma, Wenqi Shi, Nan Wu, Biru Zhu, Xiangyang Luo
arXiv:2606. 15890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban wellbeing from multimodal data requires integrating heterogeneous spatial and temporal signals, posing significant challenges for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
By Yanxin Xi, Xiang Su, Jie Feng, Yu Liu, Sasu Tarkoma, Pan Hui
The paper introduces a network‑based spatial context retrieval pipeline that uses pedestrian street networks and open data (OpenStreetMap, GHS‑POP) to generate compact spatial briefs for open‑weight large language models. It then builds a faithfulness benchmark that labels each model claim by its source—whether grounded in the brief or drawn from training knowledge—and tests models against planted false premises across multiple cities and model configurations. The study finds that model family and generation influence resistance to false premises more than model size, revealing dimensions of spatial reasoning not captured by traditional correctness metrics.
By Joan Perez
GeoRisk-RAG is a hierarchy‑aware framework that improves the reliability of Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) by incorporating geographic validity. It estimates geographic applicability using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)‑based distance during context retrieval, enabling selective answering. Experiments on a wildfire‑related QA dataset show that GeoRisk‑RAG reduces false confidence rates from ~0.090 to 0.009 and aligns better with human preferences.
By Meenu Ravi, Shailik Sarkar, Lulwah AlKulaib, Yordanos Tessema, Chang-Tien Lu