Shangyu Lou | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

PlaceSeek: Human-Centered Geospatial Retrieval of Urban Outdoor Places via Semantic Grounding and Affective Alignment

People search for urban outdoor places not only by category or function, but also by what activities a place can support and how it is perceived. Existing geospatial retrieval remains largely POIcentric and metadata-driven, making it difficult to satisfy openended, affective, or activity-oriented needs. We present PlaceSeek, a human-centered outdoor place retrieval framework that maps natural-language queries to geolocated street-view imagery. PlaceSeek introduces an intent-aware retrieval mechanism that decomposes user queries into functional and affective sub-intents. A Semantic Grounding Module verifies whether candidate street-view results contain the physical evidence needed to support the intended activity, while an Affective Alignment Module re-ranks physically valid candidates using a LoRA-adapted vision-language model trained on human urban perception judgments. We evaluate PlaceSeek on 31,956 street-view locations in Milan across 10 naturallanguage queries annotated by five human evaluators. PlaceSeek achieves 88.0% Precision@5, a mean match score of 3.39/4.0, and 0.920 nDCG@5, outperforming CLIP, fine-tuned CLIP, SigLIP, and a VQA-based baseline. Ablation results show that physical grounding is essential for retrieval validity, while affective alignment improves ranking quality among physically valid candidates. These findings highlight that complex urban spatial queries require modeling both verifiable visual evidence and human perceptual preferences. PlaceSeek provides a potential framework for human-centered nextgeneration geospatial retrieval systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Urban-MAS: Human-Centered Urban Prediction with LLM-Based Multi-Agent System

Urban Artificial Intelligence (Urban AI) has advanced human-centered urban tasks such as perception prediction and human dynamics. Large Language Models (LLMs) can integrate multimodal inputs to address heterogeneous data in complex urban systems but often underperform on domain-specific tasks. Urban-MAS, an LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MAS) framework, is introduced for human-centered urban prediction under zero-shot settings. It includes three agent types: Predictive Factor Guidance Agents, which prioritize key predictive factors to guide knowledge extraction and enhance the effectiveness of compressed urban knowledge in LLMs; Reliable UrbanInfo Extraction Agents, which improve robustness by comparing multiple outputs, validating consistency, and re-extracting when conflicts occur; and Multi-UrbanInfo Inference Agents, which integrate extracted multi-source information across dimensions for prediction. Experiments on running-amount prediction and urban perception across Tokyo, Milan, and Seattle demonstrate that Urban-MAS substantially reduces errors compared to single-LLM baselines. Ablation studies indicate that Predictive Factor Guidance Agents are most critical for enhancing predictive performance, positioning Urban-MAS as a scalable paradigm for human-centered urban AI prediction. Code is available on the project website:https://github.com/THETUREHOOHA/UrbanMAS

cs.MA↗