Teng Fei

Kunlin Wu, Yanning Wang, Haofeng Tan et al.

Recent image-to-audio models have shown impressive performance on object-centric visual scenes. However, their application to satellite imagery remains limited by the complex, wide-area semantic ambiguity of top-down views. While satellite imagery provides a uniquely scalable source for global soundscape generation, matching these views to real acoustic environments with unique spatial structures is inherently difficult. To address this challenge, we introduce Geo2Sound, a novel task and framework for generating geographically realistic soundscapes from satellite imagery. Specifically, Geo2Sound combines structural geospatial attributes modeling, semantic hypothesis expansion, and geo-acoustic alignment in a unified framework. A lightweight classifier summarizes overhead scenes into compact geographic attributes, multiple sound-oriented semantic hypotheses are used to generate diverse acoustically plausible candidates, and a geo-acoustic alignment module projects geographic attributes into the acoustic embedding space and identifies the candidate most consistent with the candidate sets. Moreover, we establish SatSound-Bench, the first benchmark comprising over 20k high-quality paired satellite images, text descriptions, and real-world audio recordings, collected from the field across more than 10 countries and complemented by three public datasets. Experiments show that Geo2Sound achieves a SOTA FAD of 1.765, outperforming the strongest baseline by 50.0%. Human evaluations further confirm substantial gains in both realism (26.5%) and semantic alignment, validating our high-fidelity synthesis on scale. Project page and source code: https://github.com/Blanketzzz/Geo2Sound

Yuhao Kang, Kunlin Wu, Song Gao et al.

Spatial clustering has been widely used for spatial data mining and knowledge discovery. An ideal multivariate spatial clustering should consider both spatial contiguity and aspatial attributes. Existing spatial clustering approaches may face challenges for discovering repeated geographic patterns with spatial contiguity maintained. In this paper, we propose a Spatial Toeplitz Inverse Covariance-Based Clustering (STICC) method that considers both attributes and spatial relationships of geographic objects for multivariate spatial clustering. A subregion is created for each geographic object serving as the basic unit when performing clustering. A Markov random field is then constructed to characterize the attribute dependencies of subregions. Using a spatial consistency strategy, nearby objects are encouraged to belong to the same cluster. To test the performance of the proposed STICC algorithm, we apply it in two use cases. The comparison results with several baseline methods show that the STICC outperforms others significantly in terms of adjusted rand index and macro-F1 score. Join count statistics is also calculated and shows that the spatial contiguity is well preserved by STICC. Such a spatial clustering method may benefit various applications in the fields of geography, remote sensing, transportation, and urban planning, etc.

Srinivas Ravishankar, Ishayu Ghosh, Nora Zajzon et al.

Recent attempts at creating Foundation Models (FMs) for Electroencephalography (EEG) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks including Motor Imagery (MI). These MI tasks have typically involved coarse classification between imagined limb movements. However, the development of foundation models necessitates diverse datasets, both for pretraining and evaluating the progress of these models. In this work, we propose handwriting decoding as a challenging motor task for FMs. We show that several existing datasets are potentially confounded, and introduce a dataset that more rigorously evaluates models. On this dataset, we find that current FMs, despite showing SOTA performance in multiple MI datasets are outperformed by smaller task-specific models. We also highlight challenges specific to EEG-based handwriting decoding to inform future work. In our 4-letter classification task, we show that (a) Knowledge of movement-onset is crucial to reported decoding performance in prior works, with average performance across subjects dropping from $41.3\%$ to $32.4\%$. (b) Increasing test-time signal quality provides significant performance improvements ($45\%$ to $78\%$ in our best subject) compared to scaling training data with single-trial EEG. (c) While scaling training data steadily improves decoding performance, existing FMs do not outperform specialist models in handwriting decoding. We make our code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EEG-Handwriting-BCI-DFCD/

Shuangquan Feng, Laura Fleig, Ruisen Tu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) enable increasingly capable tutoring-style conversational agents, yet effective tutoring requires sensitivity to learners' affective and cognitive states beyond text alone. Facial expressions provide immediate and practical cues of confusion, frustration, or engagement, but remain underexplored in LLM-driven tutoring. We investigate whether facial-expression-aware signals can improve empathetic tutoring responses through prompt-level integration, without end-to-end retraining. We build a scalable simulated tutoring environment where a student agent exhibits diverse facial behaviors from a large unlabeled facial expression video dataset, and compare four tutor variants: a text-only LLM baseline, a multimodal baseline using a random facial frame, and two Action Unit estimation model (AUM)-based methods that either inject textual AU descriptions or select a peak-expression frame for visual grounding. Across 960 multi-turn conversations spanning three tutor backbones (GPT-5.1, Claude Ops 4.5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro), we evaluate targeted pairwise comparisons with five human raters and an exhaustive AI evaluator. AU-based conditioning consistently improves empathetic responsiveness to facial expressions across all tutor backbones, while AUM-guided peak-frame selection outperforms random-frame visual input. Textual AU abstraction and peak-frame visual injection show model-dependent advantages. Control analyses show that this improvement does not come at the expense of worse pedagogical clarity or responsiveness to textual cues. Finally, AI-human agreement is highest on facial-expression-grounded empathy, supporting scalable AI evaluation for this dimension. Overall, our results show that lightweight, structured facial expression representations can meaningfully enhance empathy in LLM-based tutoring systems with minimal overhead.

Pengyu Chen, Xiao Huang, Teng Fei et al.

Environmental soundscapes convey substantial ecological and social information regarding urban environments; however, their potential remains largely untapped in large-scale geographic analysis. In this study, we investigate the extent to which urban sounds correspond with visual scenes by comparing various visual representation strategies in capturing acoustic semantics. We employ a multimodal approach that integrates geo-referenced sound recordings with both street-level and remote sensing imagery across three major global cities: London, New York, and Tokyo. Utilizing the AST model for audio, along with CLIP and RemoteCLIP for imagery, as well as CLIPSeg and Seg-Earth OV for semantic segmentation, we extract embeddings and class-level features to evaluate cross-modal similarity. The results indicate that street view embeddings demonstrate stronger alignment with environmental sounds compared to segmentation outputs, whereas remote sensing segmentation is more effective in interpreting ecological categories through a Biophony--Geophony--Anthrophony (BGA) framework. These findings imply that embedding-based models offer superior semantic alignment, while segmentation-based methods provide interpretable links between visual structure and acoustic ecology. This work advances the burgeoning field of multimodal urban sensing by offering novel perspectives for incorporating sound into geospatial analysis.

Junbo Wang, Haofeng Tan, Bowen Liao et al.

We present a novel and practically significant problem-Geo-Contextual Soundscape-to-Landscape (GeoS2L) generation-which aims to synthesize geographically realistic landscape images from environmental soundscapes. Prior audio-to-image generation methods typically rely on general-purpose datasets and overlook geographic and environmental contexts, resulting in unrealistic images that are misaligned with real-world environmental settings. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel geo-contextual computational framework that explicitly integrates geographic knowledge into multimodal generative modeling. We construct two large-scale geo-contextual multimodal datasets, SoundingSVI and SonicUrban, pairing diverse soundscapes with real-world landscape images. We propose SounDiT, a novel Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based model that incorporates geo-contextual scene conditioning to synthesize geographically coherent landscape images. Furthermore, we propose a practically-informed geo-contextual evaluation framework, the Place Similarity Score (PSS), across element-, scene-, and human perception-levels to measure consistency between input soundscapes and generated landscape images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SounDiT outperforms existing baselines in both visual fidelity and geographic settings. Our work not only establishes foundational benchmarks for GeoS2L generation but also highlights the importance of incorporating geographic domain knowledge in advancing multimodal generative models, opening new directions at the intersection of generative AI, geography, urban planning, and environmental sciences.

Pengyu Chen, Teng Fei, Yunyan Du et al.

Conflicts between humans and bears on the Tibetan Plateau present substantial threats to local communities and hinder wildlife preservation initiatives. This research introduces a novel strategy that incorporates computer vision alongside Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to alleviate these issues. Tailored specifically for the harsh environment of the Tibetan Plateau, the approach utilizes the K210 development board paired with the YOLO object detection framework along with a tailored bear-deterrent mechanism, offering minimal energy usage and real-time efficiency in bear identification and deterrence. The model's performance was evaluated experimentally, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 91.4%, demonstrating excellent precision and dependability. By integrating energy-efficient components, the proposed system effectively surpasses the challenges of remote and off-grid environments, ensuring uninterrupted operation in secluded locations. This study provides a viable, eco-friendly, and expandable solution to mitigate human-bear conflicts, thereby improving human safety and promoting bear conservation in isolated areas like Yushu, China.

Yonggai Zhuang, Haoran Chen, Kequan Wang et al.

The complexity of stocks and industries presents challenges for stock prediction. Currently, stock prediction models can be divided into two categories. One category, represented by GRU and ALSTM, relies solely on stock factors for prediction, with limited effectiveness. The other category, represented by HIST and TRA, incorporates not only stock factors but also industry information, industry financial reports, public sentiment, and other inputs for prediction. The second category of models can capture correlations between stocks by introducing additional information, but the extra data is difficult to standardize and generalize. Considering the current state and limitations of these two types of models, this paper proposes the GRU-PFG (Project Factors into Graph) model. This model only takes stock factors as input and extracts inter-stock correlations using graph neural networks. It achieves prediction results that not only outperform the others models relies solely on stock factors, but also achieve comparable performance to the second category models. The experimental results show that on the CSI300 dataset, the IC of GRU-PFG is 0.134, outperforming HIST's 0.131 and significantly surpassing GRU and Transformer, achieving results better than the second category models. Moreover as a model that relies solely on stock factors, it has greater potential for generalization.

Yuhao Kang, Qingyuan Jia, Song Gao et al.

The emergence of big data enables us to evaluate the various human emotions at places from a statistic perspective by applying affective computing. In this study, a novel framework for extracting human emotions from large-scale georeferenced photos at different places is proposed. After the construction of places based on spatial clustering of user generated footprints collected in social media websites, online cognitive services are utilized to extract human emotions from facial expressions using the state-of-the-art computer vision techniques. And two happiness metrics are defined for measuring the human emotions at different places. To validate the feasibility of the framework, we take 80 tourist attractions around the world as an example and a happiness ranking list of places is generated based on human emotions calculated over 2 million faces detected out from over 6 million photos. Different kinds of geographical contexts are taken into consideration to find out the relationship between human emotions and environmental factors. Results show that much of the emotional variation at different places can be explained by a few factors such as openness. The research may offer insights on integrating human emotions to enrich the understanding of sense of place in geography and in place-based GIS.