Ce Hou

Yecheng Zhang, Rong Zhao, Zhizhou Sha et al.

Aligning vision-language model (VLM) outputs with human preferences in domain-specific tasks typically requires fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, both of which demand labelled data and GPU compute. We show that for subjective perception tasks, this alignment can be achieved without any model training: VLMs are already strong concept extractors but poor decision calibrators, and the gap can be closed externally. We propose a training-free post-hoc concept-bottleneck pipeline consisting of three tightly coupled stages: concept mining, multi-agent structured scoring, and geometric calibration, unified by an end-to-end dimension optimization loop. Interpretable evaluation dimensions are mined from a handful of human annotations; an Observer-Debater-Judge chain extracts robust continuous concept scores from a frozen VLM; and locally-weighted ridge regression on a hybrid visual-semantic manifold calibrates these scores against human ratings. Applied to urban perception as UrbanAlign, the framework achieves 72.2% accuracy ($κ=0.45$) on Place Pulse 2.0 across six categories, outperforming the best supervised baseline by +15.1 pp and uncalibrated VLM scoring by +16.3 pp, with full dimension-level interpretability and zero model-weight modification.

Furong Jia, Lanxin Liu, Ce Hou et al.

Worldwide geo-localization involves determining the exact geographic location of images captured globally, typically guided by geographic cues such as climate, landmarks, and architectural styles. Despite advancements in geo-localization models like GeoCLIP, which leverages images and location alignment via contrastive learning for accurate predictions, the interpretability of these models remains insufficiently explored. Current concept-based interpretability methods fail to align effectively with Geo-alignment image-location embedding objectives, resulting in suboptimal interpretability and performance. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework integrating global geo-localization with concept bottlenecks. Our method inserts a Concept-Aware Alignment Module that jointly projects image and location embeddings onto a shared bank of geographic concepts (e.g., tropical climate, mountain, cathedral) and minimizes a concept-level loss, enhancing alignment in a concept-specific subspace and enabling robust interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce interpretability into geo-localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses GeoCLIP in geo-localization accuracy and boosts performance across diverse geospatial prediction tasks, revealing richer semantic insights into geographic decision-making processes.