Spatial data are central to applications such as environmental monitoring and urban planning, but are often distributed across devices where privacy and communication constraints limit direct sharing. Federated modeling offers a practical solution that preserves data privacy while enabling global modeling across distributed data sources. For instance, environmental sensor networks are privacy-and bandwidth-constrained, motivating federated spatial modeling that shares only privacy-preserving summaries to produce timely, high-resolution pollution maps without centralizing raw data. However, existing federated modeling approaches either ignore spatial dependence or rely on synchronous updates that suffer from stragglers in heterogeneous environments. This work proposes an asynchronous federated modeling framework for spatial data based on low-rank Gaussian process approximations. The method employs block-wise optimization and introduces strategies for gradient correction, adaptive aggregation, and stabilized updates. We establish linear convergence with explicit dependence on staleness, a result of standalone theoretical significance. Moreover, numerical experiments demonstrate that the asynchronous algorithm achieves synchronous performance under balanced resource allocation and significantly outperforms it in heterogeneous settings, showcasing superior robustness and scalability. Keywords: Asynchronous federated learning, distributed spatial modeling, Gaussian processes, low-rank approximation, block-wise optimization.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) tasks within general databases. However, extending to GeoSQL introduces additional complexity from spatial data types, function invocation, and coordinate systems, which greatly increases generation and execution difficulty. Existing benchmarks mainly target general SQL, and a systematic evaluation framework for GeoSQL is still lacking. To fill this gap, we present GeoSQL-Eval, the first end-to-end automated evaluation framework for PostGIS query generation, together with GeoSQL-Bench, a benchmark for assessing LLM performance in NL2GeoSQL tasks. GeoSQL-Bench defines three task categories-conceptual understanding, syntax-level SQL generation, and schema retrieval-comprising 14,178 instances, 340 PostGIS functions, and 82 thematic databases. GeoSQL-Eval is grounded in Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) model, covering four cognitive dimensions, five capability levels, and twenty task types to establish a comprehensive process from knowledge acquisition and syntax generation to semantic alignment, execution accuracy, and robustness. We evaluate 24 representative models across six categories and apply the entropy weight method with statistical analyses to uncover performance differences, common error patterns, and resource usage. Finally, we release a public GeoSQL-Eval leaderboard platform for continuous testing and global comparison. This work extends the NL2GeoSQL paradigm and provides a standardized, interpretable, and extensible framework for evaluating LLMs in spatial database contexts, offering valuable references for geospatial information science and related applications.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models built on pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) require extensive post-training, resulting in high computational overhead that limits scalability and deployment.We propose CogVLA, a Cognition-Aligned Vision-Language-Action framework that leverages instruction-driven routing and sparsification to improve both efficiency and performance. CogVLA draws inspiration from human multimodal coordination and introduces a 3-stage progressive architecture. 1) Encoder-FiLM based Aggregation Routing (EFA-Routing) injects instruction information into the vision encoder to selectively aggregate and compress dual-stream visual tokens, forming a instruction-aware latent representation. 2) Building upon this compact visual encoding, LLM-FiLM based Pruning Routing (LFP-Routing) introduces action intent into the language model by pruning instruction-irrelevant visually grounded tokens, thereby achieving token-level sparsity. 3) To ensure that compressed perception inputs can still support accurate and coherent action generation, we introduce V-L-A Coupled Attention (CAtten), which combines causal vision-language attention with bidirectional action parallel decoding. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that CogVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance with success rates of 97.4% and 70.0%, respectively, while reducing training costs by 2.5-fold and decreasing inference latency by 2.8-fold compared to OpenVLA. CogVLA is open-sourced and publicly available at https://github.com/JiuTian-VL/CogVLA.

With rapid urbanization, predicting urban microclimates has become critical, as it affects building energy demand and public health risks. However, existing generative and homogeneous graph approaches fall short in capturing physical consistency, spatial dependencies, and temporal variability. To address this, we introduce UrbanGraph, a physics-informed framework integrating heterogeneous and dynamic spatio-temporal graphs. It encodes key physical processes -- vegetation evapotranspiration, shading, and convective diffusion -- while modeling complex spatial dependencies among diverse urban entities and their temporal evolution. We evaluate UrbanGraph on UMC4/12, a physics-based simulation dataset covering diverse urban configurations and climates. Results show that UrbanGraph improves $R^2$ by up to 10.8% and reduces FLOPs by 17.0% over all baselines, with heterogeneous and dynamic graphs contributing 3.5% and 7.1% gains. Our dataset provides the first high-resolution benchmark for spatio-temporal microclimate modeling, and our method extends to broader urban heterogeneous dynamic computing tasks.

We introduce Geo-R1, a reasoning-centric post-training framework that unlocks geospatial reasoning in vision-language models by combining thinking scaffolding and elevating. In the scaffolding stage, Geo-R1 instills a "geospatial thinking paradigm" via supervised fine-tuning on synthetic chain-of-thought exemplars, enabling models to connect visual cues with geographic priors without costly human reasoning annotations. In the elevating stage, it uses GRPO-based reinforcement learning on a weakly-supervised cross-view pairing proxy. This design supplies a verifiable and scalable reward signal: teaching models to capture and reconcile features across modalities, and harnessing reasoning for accurate prediction. Geo-R1 extends geospatial modeling from domain pretraining / supervised finetuning to reasoning-first post-training, and achieves state-of-the-art performance across various geospatial reasoning benchmarks. Our model is available at https://huggingface.co/miniHui/Geo-R1. Figure 1: Geo-R1 significantly outperforms baseline Bai et al. (2025) across 13 verifiable geo-reasoning tasks on the GeoChain benchmark (Y er-ramilli et al., 2025) in the zero-shot setting. See Table 6 for detailed description of these tasks. Geospatial reasoning is fundamental to a wide range of scientific and societal applications, spanning disaster response, search and rescue, urban planning, environmental monitoring, and sociocultural study. Unlike common vision-language reasoning (Li et al., 2024) centering around object recognition, captioning and general question-answering, geospatial reasoning spans many modalities (e.g., aerial imagery, streetview photos, location metadata, place information, etc.), and varied tasks (e.g., geographical, environmental, sociocultural, etc.) as shown in Figure 1. This blend of multimodal evidence and knowledge-intensive tasking makes general reasoning both crucial for geospatial understanding, and also uniquely challenging. While effective in natural domains, SFT is poorly suited in geospatial settings. Geospatial raw data can be plentiful, but supervisions are sparse, usually limited to coordinate metadata without descriptive content.

To fully leverage spatial information for remote sensing image segmentation and address semantic edge ambiguities caused by grayscale variations (e.g., shadows and low-contrast regions), we propose the Frequency and Spatial Domains based Detail Enhancement Network (FSDENet). Our framework employs spatial processing methods to extract rich multi-scale spatial features and fine-grained semantic details. By effectively integrating global and frequency-domain information through the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in global mappings, the model's capability to discern global representations under grayscale variations is significantly strengthened. Additionally, we utilize Haar wavelet transform to decompose features into high- and low-frequency components, leveraging their distinct sensitivity to edge information to refine boundary segmentation. The model achieves dual-domain synergy by integrating spatial granularity with frequency-domain edge sensitivity, substantially improving segmentation accuracy in boundary regions and grayscale transition zones. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that FSDENet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four widely adopted datasets: LoveDA, Vaihingen, Potsdam, and iSAID.

Semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a critical area of research within robotics and computer vision, focusing on the simultaneous localization of robotic systems and associating semantic information to construct the most accurate and complete comprehensive model of the surrounding environment. Since the first foundational work in Semantic SLAM appeared more than two decades ago, this field has received increasing attention across various scientific communities. Despite its significance, the field lacks comprehensive surveys encompassing recent advances and persistent challenges. In response, this study provides a thorough examination of the state-of-the-art of Semantic SLAM techniques, with the aim of illuminating current trends and key obstacles. Beginning with an in-depth exploration of the evolution of visual SLAM, this study outlines its strengths and unique characteristics, while also critically assessing previous survey literature. Subsequently, a unified problem formulation and evaluation of the modular solution framework is proposed, which divides the problem into discrete stages, including visual localization, semantic feature extraction, mapping, data association, and loop closure optimization. Moreover, this study investigates alternative methodologies such as deep learning and the utilization of large language models, alongside a review of relevant research about contemporary SLAM datasets. Concluding with a discussion on potential future research directions, this study serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers seeking to navigate the complex landscape of Semantic SLAM.

Spatial reasoning is fundamental to auditory perception, yet current audio large language models (ALLMs) largely rely on unstructured binaural cues and single step inference. This limits both perceptual accuracy in direction and distance estimation and the capacity for interpretable reasoning. Recent work such as BAT demonstrates spatial QA with binaural audio, but its reliance on coarse categorical labels (left, right, up, down) and the absence of explicit geometric supervision constrain resolution and robustness. We introduce the $\textbf{Spatial-Acoustic Geometry Encoder (SAGE}$), a geometry-aware audio encoder that aligns binaural acoustic features with 3D spatial structure using panoramic depth images and room-impulse responses at training time, while requiring only audio at inference. Building on this representation, we present $\textbf{OWL}$, an ALLM that integrates $\textbf{SAGE}$ with a spatially grounded chain-of-thought to rationalize over direction-of-arrivals (DoA) and distance estimates. Through curriculum learning from perceptual QA to multi-step reasoning, $\textbf{OWL}$ supports o'clock-level azimuth and DoA estimation. To enable large-scale training and evaluation, we construct and release $\textbf{BiDepth}$, a dataset of over one million QA pairs combining binaural audio with panoramic depth images and room impulse responses across both in-room and out-of-room scenarios. Across two benchmark datasets, our new $\textbf{BiDepth}$ and the public SpatialSoundQA, $\textbf{OWL}$ reduces mean DoA error by $\textbf{11$^{\circ}$}$ through $\textbf{SAGE}$ and improves spatial reasoning QA accuracy by up to $\textbf{25}$\% over BAT.

In this paper, we present MUVLA, a Map Understanding Vision-Language-Action model tailored for object navigation. It leverages semantic map abstractions to unify and structure historical information, encoding spatial context in a compact and consistent form. MUVLA takes the current and history observations, as well as the semantic map, as inputs and predicts the action sequence based on the description of goal object. Furthermore, it amplifies supervision through reward-guided return modeling based on dense short-horizon progress signals, enabling the model to develop a detailed understanding of action value for reward maximization. MUVLA employs a three-stage training pipeline: learning map-level spatial understanding, imitating behaviors from mixed-quality demonstrations, and reward amplification. This strategy allows MUVLA to unify diverse demonstrations into a robust spatial representation and generate more rational exploration strategies. Experiments on HM3D and Gibson benchmarks demonstrate that MUVLA achieves great generalization and learns effective exploration behaviors even from low-quality or partially successful trajectories.