arXiv subjects

Weiming Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Weiming Huang.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

PILOT: One Physics-Integrated Generation Framework to Unify 2D and 3D Radio Map Construction

Unified 2D and 3D radio map construction supports network planning, wireless digital twins, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications. In urban environments, blockage, reflection, and diffraction make accurate construction expensive for physics-based solvers. Autoregressive next-token prediction offers a single sequential formulation that can cover both 2D and 3D generation, but standard raster ordering ignores the spatial structure of radio propagation. When generation follows propagation, each token is predicted from propagation-relevant history rather than spatially arbitrary context, which provides more causally informative conditioning and lowers conditional uncertainty. We propose PILOT, a pretrained autoregressive framework that replaces raster scan with a wavefront sequence expanding outward from the transmitter. Each prediction step is guided by an environment-aware instruction that spatially aligns environment features with the queried radio map region. The same framework extends to 3D radio maps through height-slice stacking while a gradient loss enforces vertical continuity. On standard 2D benchmarks, PILOT achieves the lowest NMSE among all baselines. For volumetric generation, it reduces NMSE by 78% relative to the diffusion baseline at roughly $2500\times$ faster inference. It also outperforms methods that rely on 10% sparse measurements and achieves the best zero-shot results in the cross-domain evaluation.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

SCOT: Multi-Source Cross-City Transfer with Optimal-Transport Soft-Correspondence Objective

Cross-city transfer improves prediction in label-scarce cities by leveraging labeled data from other cities, but it becomes challenging when cities adopt incompatible partitions and no ground-truth region correspondences exist. Existing approaches either rely on heuristic region matching, which is often sensitive to anchor choices, or perform distribution-level alignment that leaves correspondences implicit and can be unstable under strong heterogeneity. We propose SCOT, a cross-city representation learning framework that learns explicit soft correspondences between unequal region sets via Sinkhorn-based entropic optimal transport. SCOT further sharpens transferable structure with an OT-weighted contrastive objective and stabilizes optimization through a cycle-style reconstruction regularizer. For multi-source transfer, SCOT aligns each source and the target to a shared prototype hub using balanced entropic transport guided by a target-induced prototype prior. Across real-world cities and tasks, SCOT consistently improves transfer accuracy and robustness, while the learned transport couplings and hub assignments provide interpretable diagnostics of alignment quality.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Into the Unknown: Applying Inductive Spatial-Semantic Location Embeddings for Predicting Individuals' Mobility Beyond Visited Places

Predicting individuals' next locations is a core task in human mobility modelling, with wide-ranging implications for urban planning, transportation, public policy and personalised mobility services. Traditional approaches largely depend on location embeddings learned from historical mobility patterns, limiting their ability to encode explicit spatial information, integrate rich urban semantic context, and accommodate previously unseen locations. To address these challenges, we explore the application of CaLLiPer -- a multimodal representation learning framework that fuses spatial coordinates and semantic features of points of interest through contrastive learning -- for location embedding in individual mobility prediction. CaLLiPer's embeddings are spatially explicit, semantically enriched, and inductive by design, enabling robust prediction performance even in scenarios involving emerging locations. Through extensive experiments on four public mobility datasets under both conventional and inductive settings, we demonstrate that CaLLiPer consistently outperforms strong baselines, particularly excelling in inductive scenarios. Our findings highlight the potential of multimodal, inductive location embeddings to advance the capabilities of human mobility prediction systems. We also release the code and data (https://github.com/xlwang233/Into-the-Unknown) to foster reproducibility and future research.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

A Support Vector Approach in Segmented Regression for Map-assisted Non-cooperative Source Localization

This paper presents a non-cooperative source localization approach based on received signal strength (RSS) and 2D environment map, considering both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. Conventional localization methods, e.g., weighted centroid localization (WCL), may perform bad. This paper proposes a segmented regression approach using 2D maps to estimate source location and propagation environment jointly. By leveraging topological information from the 2D maps, a support vector-assisted algorithm is developed to solve the segmented regression problem, separate the LOS and NLOS measurements, and estimate the location of source. The proposed method demonstrates a good localization performance with an improvement of over 30% in localization rooted mean squared error (RMSE) compared to the baseline methods.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Geospatial Objects: A Survey

The proliferation of various data sources in urban and territorial environments has significantly facilitated the development of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) across a wide range of geospatial applications. However, geospatial data, which is inherently linked to geospatial objects, often exhibits data heterogeneity that necessitates specialized fusion and representation strategies while simultaneously being inherently sparse in labels for downstream tasks. Consequently, there is a growing demand for techniques that can effectively leverage geospatial data without heavy reliance on task-specific labels and model designs. This need aligns with the principles of self-supervised learning (SSL), which has garnered increasing attention for its ability to learn effective and generalizable representations directly from data without extensive labeled supervision. This paper presents a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of SSL techniques specifically applied to or developed for geospatial objects in three primary vector geometric types: Point, Polyline, and Polygon. We systematically categorize various SSL techniques into predictive and contrastive methods, and analyze their adaptation to different data types for representation learning across various downstream tasks. Furthermore, we examine the emerging trends in SSL for geospatial objects, particularly the gradual advancements towards geospatial foundation models. Finally, we discuss key challenges in current research and outline promising directions for future investigation. By offering a structured analysis of existing studies, this paper aims to inspire continued progress in integrating SSL with geospatial objects, and the development of geospatial foundation models in a longer term.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Road Network Representation Learning with the Third Law of Geography

Road network representation learning aims to learn compressed and effective vectorized representations for road segments that are applicable to numerous tasks. In this paper, we identify the limitations of existing methods, particularly their overemphasis on the distance effect as outlined in the First Law of Geography. In response, we propose to endow road network representation with the principles of the recent Third Law of Geography. To this end, we propose a novel graph contrastive learning framework that employs geographic configuration-aware graph augmentation and spectral negative sampling, ensuring that road segments with similar geographic configurations yield similar representations, and vice versa, aligning with the principles stated in the Third Law. The framework further fuses the Third Law with the First Law through a dual contrastive learning objective to effectively balance the implications of both laws. We evaluate our framework on two real-world datasets across three downstream tasks. The results show that the integration of the Third Law significantly improves the performance of road segment representations in downstream tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

SwG-former: A Sliding-Window Graph Convolutional Network for Simultaneous Spatial-Temporal Information Extraction in Sound Event Localization and Detection

Sound event localization and detection (SELD) involves sound event detection (SED) and direction of arrival (DoA) estimation tasks. SED mainly relies on temporal dependencies to distinguish different sound classes, while DoA estimation depends on spatial correlations to estimate source directions. This paper addresses the need to simultaneously extract spatial-temporal information in audio signals to improve SELD performance. A novel block, the sliding-window graph-former (SwG-former), is designed to learn temporal context information of sound events based on their spatial correlations. The SwG-former block transforms audio signals into a graph representation and constructs graph vertices to capture higher abstraction levels for spatial correlations. It uses different-sized sliding windows to adapt various sound event durations and aggregates temporal features with similar spatial information while incorporating multi-head self-attention (MHSA) to model global information. Furthermore, as the cornerstone of message passing, a robust Conv2dAgg function is proposed and embedded into the block to aggregate the features of neighbor vertices. As a result, a SwG-former model, which stacks the SwG-former blocks, demonstrates superior performance compared to recent advanced SELD models. The SwG-former block is also integrated into the event-independent network version 2 (EINV2), called SwG-EINV2, which surpasses the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods under the same acoustic environment.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2024

LAMP: A Language Model on the Map

Large Language Models (LLMs) are poised to play an increasingly important role in our lives, providing assistance across a wide array of tasks. In the geospatial domain, LLMs have demonstrated the ability to answer generic questions, such as identifying a country's capital; nonetheless, their utility is hindered when it comes to answering fine-grained questions about specific places, such as grocery stores or restaurants, which constitute essential aspects of people's everyday lives. This is mainly because the places in our cities haven't been systematically fed into LLMs, so as to understand and memorize them. This study introduces a novel framework for fine-tuning a pre-trained model on city-specific data, to enable it to provide accurate recommendations, while minimizing hallucinations. We share our model, LAMP, and the data used to train it. We conduct experiments to analyze its ability to correctly retrieving spatial objects, and compare it to well-known open- and closed- source language models, such as GPT-4. Finally, we explore its emerging capabilities through a case study on day planning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Urban Region Embedding via Multi-View Contrastive Prediction

Recently, learning urban region representations utilizing multi-modal data (information views) has become increasingly popular, for deep understanding of the distributions of various socioeconomic features in cities. However, previous methods usually blend multi-view information in a posteriors stage, falling short in learning coherent and consistent representations across different views. In this paper, we form a new pipeline to learn consistent representations across varying views, and propose the multi-view Contrastive Prediction model for urban Region embedding (ReCP), which leverages the multiple information views from point-of-interest (POI) and human mobility data. Specifically, ReCP comprises two major modules, namely an intra-view learning module utilizing contrastive learning and feature reconstruction to capture the unique information from each single view, and inter-view learning module that perceives the consistency between the two views using a contrastive prediction learning scheme. We conduct thorough experiments on two downstream tasks to assess the proposed model, i.e., land use clustering and region popularity prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods significantly in urban region representation learning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

City Foundation Models for Learning General Purpose Representations from OpenStreetMap

Pre-trained Foundation Models (PFMs) have ushered in a paradigm-shift in Artificial Intelligence, due to their ability to learn general-purpose representations that can be readily employed in a wide range of downstream tasks. While PFMs have been successfully adopted in various fields such as Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, their capacity in handling geospatial data and answering urban questions remains limited. This can be attributed to the intrinsic heterogeneity of geospatial data, which encompasses different data types, including points, segments and regions, as well as multiple information modalities, such as a spatial position, visual characteristics and textual annotations. The proliferation of Volunteered Geographic Information initiatives, and the ever-increasing availability of open geospatial data sources, like OpenStreetMap, which is freely accessible globally, unveil a promising opportunity to bridge this gap. In this paper, we present CityFM, a self-supervised framework to train a foundation model within a selected geographical area of interest, such as a city. CityFM relies solely on open data from OSM, and produces multimodal representations of entities of different types, incorporating spatial, visual, and textual information. We analyse the entity representations generated using our foundation models from a qualitative perspective, and conduct quantitative experiments on road, building, and region-level downstream tasks. We compare its results to algorithms tailored specifically for the respective applications. In all the experiments, CityFM achieves performance superior to, or on par with, the baselines.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

On the Opportunities and Challenges of Foundation Models for Geospatial Artificial Intelligence

Large pre-trained models, also known as foundation models (FMs), are trained in a task-agnostic manner on large-scale data and can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks by fine-tuning, few-shot, or even zero-shot learning. Despite their successes in language and vision tasks, we have yet seen an attempt to develop foundation models for geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI). In this work, we explore the promises and challenges of developing multimodal foundation models for GeoAI. We first investigate the potential of many existing FMs by testing their performances on seven tasks across multiple geospatial subdomains including Geospatial Semantics, Health Geography, Urban Geography, and Remote Sensing. Our results indicate that on several geospatial tasks that only involve text modality such as toponym recognition, location description recognition, and US state-level/county-level dementia time series forecasting, these task-agnostic LLMs can outperform task-specific fully-supervised models in a zero-shot or few-shot learning setting. However, on other geospatial tasks, especially tasks that involve multiple data modalities (e.g., POI-based urban function classification, street view image-based urban noise intensity classification, and remote sensing image scene classification), existing foundation models still underperform task-specific models. Based on these observations, we propose that one of the major challenges of developing a FM for GeoAI is to address the multimodality nature of geospatial tasks. After discussing the distinct challenges of each geospatial data modality, we suggest the possibility of a multimodal foundation model which can reason over various types of geospatial data through geospatial alignments. We conclude this paper by discussing the unique risks and challenges to develop such a model for GeoAI.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Narrative Cartography with Knowledge Graphs

Narrative cartography is a discipline which studies the interwoven nature of stories and maps. However, conventional geovisualization techniques of narratives often encounter several prominent challenges, including the data acquisition & integration challenge and the semantic challenge. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose the idea of narrative cartography with knowledge graphs (KGs). Firstly, to tackle the data acquisition & integration challenge, we develop a set of KG-based GeoEnrichment toolboxes to allow users to search and retrieve relevant data from integrated cross-domain knowledge graphs for narrative mapping from within a GISystem. With the help of this tool, the retrieved data from KGs are directly materialized in a GIS format which is ready for spatial analysis and mapping. Two use cases - Magellan's expedition and World War II - are presented to show the effectiveness of this approach. In the meantime, several limitations are identified from this approach, such as data incompleteness, semantic incompatibility, and the semantic challenge in geovisualization. For the later two limitations, we propose a modular ontology for narrative cartography, which formalizes both the map content (Map Content Module) and the geovisualization process (Cartography Module). We demonstrate that, by representing both the map content and the geovisualization process in KGs (an ontology), we can realize both data reusability and map reproducibility for narrative cartography.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2007

Fundamental Structure of Loop Quantum Gravity

In this review, the fundamental structure of loop quantum gravity is presented pedagogically. Our main aim is to help non-experts to understand the motivations, basic structures, as well as general results. It may also be beneficial to practitioners to gain insights from different perspectives on the theory. We will focus on the theoretical framework itself, rather than its applications, and do our best to write it in modern and precise langauge while keeping the presentation accessible for beginners. After reviewing the classical connection dynamical formalism of general relativity, as a foundation, the construction of kinematical Ashtekar-Isham-Lewandowski representation is introduced in the content of quantum kinematics. The algebraic structure of quantum kinematics is also discussed. In the content of quantum dynamics, we mainly introduce the construction of a Hamiltonian constraint operator and the master constraint project. At last, some applications and recent advances are outlined. It should be noted that this strategy of quantizing gravity can also be extended to obtain other background independent quantum gauge theories. There is no divergence within this background independent and diffeomorphism invariant quantization programme of matter coupled to gravity.

gr-qc↗