Recently, token-based generation approaches have demonstrated their effectiveness in synthesizing visual content. As a representative example, non-autoregressive Transformers (NATs) can generate decent-quality images in just a few steps. NATs perform generation in a progressive manner, where the latent tokens of a resulting image are incrementally revealed step-by-step. At each step, the unrevealed image regions are padded with [MASK] tokens and inferred by NAT, with the most reliable predictions preserved as newly revealed, visible tokens. In this paper, we delve into understanding the mechanisms behind the effectiveness of NATs and uncover two important interaction patterns that naturally emerge from NAT's paradigm: Spatially (within a step), although [MASK] and visible tokens are processed uniformly by NATs, the interactions between them are highly asymmetric.

Spatial representation learning (SRL) aims at learning general-purpose neural network representations from various types of spatial data (e.g., points, polylines, polygons, networks, images, etc.) in their native formats. Learning good spatial representations is a fundamental problem for various downstream applications such as species distribution modeling, weather forecasting, trajectory generation, geographic question answering, etc. Even though SRL has become the foundation of almost all geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) research, we have not yet seen significant efforts to develop an extensive deep learning framework and benchmark to support SRL model development and evaluation. To fill this gap, we propose TorchSpatial, a learning framework and benchmark for location (point) encoding,which is one of the most fundamental data types of spatial representation learning. TorchSpatial contains three key components: 1) a unified location encoding framework that consolidates 15 commonly recognized location encoders, ensuring scalability and reproducibility of the implementations; 2) the LocBench benchmark tasks encompassing 7 geo-aware image classification and 10 geo-aware imageregression datasets; 3) a comprehensive suite of evaluation metrics to quantify geo-aware models' overall performance as well as their geographic bias, with a novel Geo-Bias Score metric.

Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks and domains. Despite this promise, spatial understanding and reasoning--a fundamental component of human cognition--remains under-explored. We propose SpatialEval, a novel benchmark that covers diverse aspects of spatial reasoning such as relationship understanding, navigation, and counting. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of competitive language and vision-language models. Our findings reveal several counter-intuitive insights that have been overlooked in the literature: (1) Spatial reasoning poses significant challenges where competitive models can fall behind random guessing; (2) Despite additional visual input, VLMs often under-perform compared to their LLM counterparts; (3) When both textual and visual information is available, multi-modal language models become less reliant on visual information if sufficient textual clues are provided.

Current state-of-the-art spatial reasoning-enhanced VLMs are trained to excel at spatial visual question answering (VQA). However, we believe that higher-level 3D-aware tasks, such as articulating dynamic scene changes and motion planning, require a fundamental and explicit 3D understanding beyond current spatial VQA datasets. In this work, we present SpatialPIN, a framework designed to enhance the spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs through prompting and interacting with priors from multiple 3D foundation models in a zero-shot, training-free manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our spatial reasoning-imbued VLM performs well on various forms of spatial VQA and can extend to help in various downstream robotics tasks such as pick and stack and trajectory planning.

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an IoT-based robotic system for mapping and monitoring indoor air quality. The primary objective was to develop a mobile robot capable of autonomously mapping a closed environment, detecting concentrations of CO$_2$, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), smoke, temperature, and humidity, and transmitting real-time data to a web interface. The system integrates a set of sensors (SGP30, MQ-2, DHT11, VL53L0X, MPU6050) with an ESP32 microcontroller. It employs a mapping algorithm for spatial data acquisition and utilizes a Mamdani fuzzy logic system for air quality classification. Empirical tests in a model room demonstrated average localization errors below $5\%$, actuator motion errors under $2\%$, and sensor measurement errors within $12\%$ across all modalities. The contributions of this work include: (1) a low-cost, integrated IoT robotic platform for simultaneous mapping and air quality detection; (2) a web-based user interface for real-time visualization and control; and (3) validation of system accuracy under laboratory conditions.

We present GeoGrid-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of foundation models to understand geo-spatial data in the grid structure. Geo-spatial datasets pose distinct challenges due to their dense numerical values, strong spatial and temporal dependencies, and unique multimodal representations including tabular data, heatmaps, and geographic visualizations. To assess how foundation models can support scientific research in this domain, GeoGrid-Bench features large-scale, real-world data covering 16 climate variables across 150 locations and extended time frames. The benchmark includes approximately 3,200 question-answer pairs, systematically generated from 8 domain expert-curated templates to reflect practical tasks encountered by human scientists. These range from basic queries at a single location and time to complex spatiotemporal comparisons across regions and periods. Our evaluation reveals that vision-language models perform best overall, and we provide a fine-grained analysis of the strengths and limitations of different foundation models in different geo-spatial tasks. This benchmark offers clearer insights into how foundation models can be effectively applied to geo-spatial data analysis and used to support scientific research.

With the increasing availability of geospatial datasets, researchers have explored region representation learning (RRL) to analyze complex region characteristics. Recent RRL methods use contrastive learning (CL) to capture shared information between two modalities but often overlook task-relevant unique information specific to each modality. Such modality-specific details can explain region characteristics that shared information alone cannot capture. Bringing information factorization to RRL can address this by factorizing multimodal data into shared and unique information. However, existing factorization approaches focus on two modalities, whereas RRL can benefit from various geospatial data. Extending factorization beyond two modalities is non-trivial because modeling high-order relationships introduces a combinatorial number of learning objectives, increasing model complexity. We introduce Cross modal Knowledge Injected Embedding, an information factorization approach for RRL that captures both shared and unique representations. CooKIE uses a pairwise inter-view learning approach that captures high-order information without modeling high-order dependency, avoiding exhaustive combinations. We evaluate CooKIE on three regression tasks and a land use classification task in New York City and Delhi, India. Results show that CooKIE outperforms existing RRL methods and a factorized RRL model, capturing multimodal information with fewer training parameters and floating-point operations per second (FLOPs). We release the code: https://github.com/MinNamgung/CooKIE.

We propose a normative model for spatial representation in the hippocampal formation that combines optimality principles, such as maximizing coding range and spatial information per neuron, with an algebraic framework for computing in distributed representation. Spatial position is encoded in a residue number system, with individual residues represented by high-dimensional, complex-valued vectors. These are composed into a single vector representing position by a similarity-preserving, conjunctive vector-binding operation. Self-consistency between the vectors representing position and the individual residues is enforced by a modular attractor network whose modules correspond to the grid cell modules in entorhinal cortex. The vector binding operation can also be used to bind different contexts to spatial representations, yielding a model for entorhinal cortex and hippocampus.

PAnoramic Semantic Segmentation (PASS) is an important task in computer vision,as it enables semantic understanding of a 360 environment. Currently,most of existing works have focused on addressing the distortion issues in 2Dpanoramic images without considering spatial properties of indoor scene. Thisrestricts PASS methods in perceiving contextual attributes to deal with the ambiguitywhen working with monocular images. In this paper, we propose a novelapproach for indoor panoramic semantic segmentation. Unlike previous works,we consider the panoramic image as a composition of segment groups: oversampledsegments, representing planar structures such as floors and ceilings, andunder-sampled segments, representing other scene elements.

Mixed time series (MiTS) comprising both continuous variables (CVs) and discrete variables (DVs) are frequently encountered yet under-explored in time series analysis. Overlooking these heterogeneities would lead to insufficient and imbalanced representation learning, bringing biased results. This paper addresses the problem with two insights: 1) DVs may originate from intrinsic latent continuous variables (LCVs), which lose fine-grained information due to extrinsic discretization; 2) LCVs and CVs share similar temporal patterns and interact spatially. Considering these similarities and interactions, we propose a general MiTS analysis framework MiTSformer, which recovers LCVs behind DVs for sufficient and balanced spatial-temporal modeling by designing two essential inductive biases: 1) hierarchically aggregating multi-scale temporal context information to enrich the information granularity of DVs; 2) adaptively learning the aggregation processes via the adversarial guidance from CVs. Subsequently, MiTSformer captures complete spatial-temporal dependencies within and across LCVs and CVs via cascaded self- and cross-attention blocks.