Yuming Lin

Jinwei Zeng, Yu Liu, Guozhen Zhang et al.

Accurately estimating high-resolution carbon emissions is crucial for effective emission governance and mitigation planning. While conventional methods for precise carbon accounting are hindered by substantial data collection efforts, the rise of open data and advanced learning techniques offers a promising solution. Once an open data-based prediction model is developed and trained, it can easily infer emissions for new areas based on available open data. To address this, we incorporate two modalities of open data, satellite images and point-of-interest (POI) data, to predict high-resolution urban carbon emissions, with satellite images providing macroscopic and static and POI data offering fine-grained and relatively dynamic functionality information. However, estimating high-resolution carbon emissions presents two significant challenges: the intertwined and implicit effects of various functionalities on carbon emissions, and the complex spatial contiguity correlations that give rise to the agglomeration effect. Our model, OpenCarbon, features two major designs that target the challenges: a cross-modality information extraction and fusion module to extract complementary functionality information from two modules and model their interactions, and a neighborhood-informed aggregation module to capture the spatial contiguity correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate our model's superiority, with a significant performance gain of 26.6\% on R2. Further generalizability tests and case studies also show OpenCarbon's capacity to capture the intrinsic relation between urban functionalities and carbon emissions, validating its potential to empower efficient carbon governance and targeted carbon mitigation planning. Codes and data are available: https://github.com/JinweiZzz/OpenCarbon.

Xin Zhang, Yu Liu, Yuming Lin et al.

Urban villages, defined as informal residential areas in or around urban centers, are characterized by inadequate infrastructures and poor living conditions, closely related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on poverty, adequate housing, and sustainable cities. Traditionally, governments heavily depend on field survey methods to monitor the urban villages, which however are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and possibly delayed. Thanks to widely available and timely updated satellite images, recent studies develop computer vision techniques to detect urban villages efficiently. However, existing studies either focus on simple urban village image classification or fail to provide accurate boundary information. To accurately identify urban village boundaries from satellite images, we harness the power of the vision foundation model and adapt the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to urban village segmentation, named UV-SAM. Specifically, UV-SAM first leverages a small-sized semantic segmentation model to produce mixed prompts for urban villages, including mask, bounding box, and image representations, which are then fed into SAM for fine-grained boundary identification. Extensive experimental results on two datasets in China demonstrate that UV-SAM outperforms existing baselines, and identification results over multiple years show that both the number and area of urban villages are decreasing over time, providing deeper insights into the development trends of urban villages and sheds light on the vision foundation models for sustainable cities. The dataset and codes of this study are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/UV-SAM.

Zhilun Zhou, Yuming Lin, Depeng Jin et al.

Participatory urban planning is the mainstream of modern urban planning that involves the active engagement of residents. However, the traditional participatory paradigm requires experienced planning experts and is often time-consuming and costly. Fortunately, the emerging Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown considerable ability to simulate human-like agents, which can be used to emulate the participatory process easily. In this work, we introduce an LLM-based multi-agent collaboration framework for participatory urban planning, which can generate land-use plans for urban regions considering the diverse needs of residents. Specifically, we construct LLM agents to simulate a planner and thousands of residents with diverse profiles and backgrounds. We first ask the planner to carry out an initial land-use plan. To deal with the different facilities needs of residents, we initiate a discussion among the residents in each community about the plan, where residents provide feedback based on their profiles. Furthermore, to improve the efficiency of discussion, we adopt a fishbowl discussion mechanism, where part of the residents discuss and the rest of them act as listeners in each round. Finally, we let the planner modify the plan based on residents' feedback. We deploy our method on two real-world regions in Beijing. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in residents satisfaction and inclusion metrics, and also outperforms human experts in terms of service accessibility and ecology metrics.

Jie Feng, Jinwei Zeng, Qingyue Long et al. · tsinghua

Over the past year, the development of large language models (LLMs) has brought spatial intelligence into focus, with much attention on vision-based embodied intelligence. However, spatial intelligence spans a broader range of disciplines and scales, from navigation and urban planning to remote sensing and earth science. What are the differences and connections between spatial intelligence across these fields? In this paper, we first review human spatial cognition and its implications for spatial intelligence in LLMs. We then examine spatial memory, knowledge representations, and abstract reasoning in LLMs, highlighting their roles and connections. Finally, we analyze spatial intelligence across scales -- from embodied to urban and global levels -- following a framework that progresses from spatial memory and understanding to spatial reasoning and intelligence. Through this survey, we aim to provide insights into interdisciplinary spatial intelligence research and inspire future studies.

En Xu, Huandong Wang, Yunke Zhang et al.

Urban systems are typical examples of complex systems, where the integration of physics-based modeling with artificial intelligence (AI) presents a promising paradigm for enhancing predictive accuracy, interpretability, and decision-making. In this context, AI excels at capturing complex, nonlinear relationships, while physics-based models ensure consistency with real-world laws and provide interpretable insights. We provide a comprehensive review of physics-informed AI methods in urban applications. The proposed taxonomy categorizes existing approaches into three paradigms - Physics-Integrated AI, Physics-AI Hybrid Ensemble, and AI-Integrated Physics - and further details seven representative methods. This classification clarifies the varying degrees and directions of physics-AI integration, guiding the selection and development of appropriate methods based on application needs and data availability. We systematically examine their applications across eight key urban domains: energy, environment, economy, transportation, information, public services, emergency management, and the urban system as a whole. Our analysis highlights how these methodologies leverage physical laws and data-driven models to address urban challenges, enhancing system reliability, efficiency, and adaptability. By synthesizing existing methodologies and their urban applications, we identify critical gaps and outline future research directions, paving the way toward next-generation intelligent urban system modeling.

Zhilun Zhou, Yuming Lin, Yong Li

Participatory urban planning is the mainstream of modern urban planning and involves the active engagement of different stakeholders. However, the traditional participatory paradigm encounters challenges in time and manpower, while the generative planning tools fail to provide adjustable and inclusive solutions. This research introduces an innovative urban planning approach integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) within the participatory process. The framework, based on the crafted LLM agent, consists of role-play, collaborative generation, and feedback iteration, solving a community-level land-use task catering to 1000 distinct interests. Empirical experiments in diverse urban communities exhibit LLM's adaptability and effectiveness across varied planning scenarios. The results were evaluated on four metrics, surpassing human experts in satisfaction and inclusion, and rivaling state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods in service and ecology. Further analysis shows the advantage of LLM agents in providing adjustable and inclusive solutions with natural language reasoning and strong scalability. While implementing the recent advancements in emulating human behavior for planning, this work envisions both planners and citizens benefiting from low-cost, efficient LLM agents, which is crucial for enhancing participation and realizing participatory urban planning.