Supporting the health and well-being of dynamic populations around the world requires governmental agencies, organizations and researchers to understand and reason over complex relationships between human behavior and local contexts in order to identify high-risk groups and strategically allocate limited resources. Traditional approaches to these classes of problems often entail developing manually curated, task-specific features and models to represent human behavior and the natural and built environment, which can be challenging to adapt to new, or even, related tasks. To address this, we introduce a Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM) that aims to capture the relationships between diverse data modalities and is applicable to a broad range of geospatial tasks. We first construct a geo-indexed dataset for postal codes and counties across the United States, capturing rich aggregated information on human behavior from maps, busyness, and aggregated search trends, and environmental factors such as weather and air quality. We then model this data and the complex relationships between locations using a graph neural network, producing embeddings that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks using relatively simple models. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by benchmarking it on 27 downstream tasks spanning three distinct domains: health indicators, socioeconomic factors, and environmental measurements. The approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on all 27 geospatial interpolation tasks, and on 25 out of the 27 extrapolation and super-resolution tasks. We combined the PDFM with a state-of-the-art forecasting foundation model, TimesFM, to predict unemployment and poverty, achieving performance that surpasses fully supervised forecasting. The full set of embeddings and sample code are publicly available for researchers.

Remote Sensing (RS) data contains a wealth of multi-dimensional information crucial for Earth observation. Owing to its vast volume, diverse sources, and temporal properties, RS data is highly suitable for the development of large Visual Foundation Models (VFMs). VFMs act as robust feature extractors, learning from extensive RS data, and are subsequently fine-tuned for deployment in various geoscientific tasks. However, current VFMs in the RS domain are predominantly pretrained and tailored exclusively for specific characteristics of RS imagery, neglecting the potential of utilizing the multi-dimensional properties of RS data. Therefore, in this work, we propose SeaMo, a pioneering visual foundation model that integrates multi-seasonal and multimodal information in the RS field. SeaMo is designed to harness multiple properties of RS data. Within the masked image modeling framework, we employ non-aligned cropping techniques to extract spatial properties, use multi-source inputs for multimodal integration, and incorporate temporal-multimodal fusion blocks for effective assimilation of multi-seasonal data. SeaMo explicitly models the multi-dimensional properties of RS data, making the model more comprehensive, robust, and versatile. We applied SeaMo to several downstream geoscience tasks, which demonstrated exceptional performance. Extensive ablation studies were conducted to validate the model's superiority.

Although large vision-language-action (VLA) models pretrained on extensive robot datasets offer promising generalist policies for robotic learning, they still struggle with spatial-temporal dynamics in interactive robotics, making them less effective in handling complex tasks, such as manipulation. In this work, we introduce visual trace prompting, a simple yet effective approach to facilitate VLA models' spatial-temporal awareness for action prediction by encoding state-action trajectories visually. We develop a new TraceVLA model by finetuning OpenVLA on our own collected dataset of 150K robot manipulation trajectories using visual trace prompting. Evaluations of TraceVLA across 137 configurations in SimplerEnv and 4 tasks on a physical WidowX robot demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, outperforming OpenVLA by 10% on SimplerEnv and 3.5x on real-robot tasks and exhibiting robust generalization across diverse embodiments and scenarios. To further validate the effectiveness and generality of our method, we present a compact VLA model based on 4B Phi-3-Vision, pretrained on the Open-X-Embodiment and finetuned on our dataset, rivals the 7B OpenVLA baseline while significantly improving inference efficiency.

Understanding human behavior in built environments is critical for designing functional, user centered urban spaces. Traditional approaches, such as manual observations, surveys, and simplified simulations, often fail to capture the complexity and dynamics of real world behavior. To address these limitations, we introduce TravelAgent, a novel simulation platform that models pedestrian navigation and activity patterns across diverse indoor and outdoor environments under varying contextual and environmental conditions. TravelAgent leverages generative agents integrated into 3D virtual environments, enabling agents to process multimodal sensory inputs and exhibit human-like decision-making, behavior, and adaptation. Through experiments, including navigation, wayfinding, and free exploration, we analyze data from 100 simulations comprising 1898 agent steps across diverse spatial layouts and agent archetypes, achieving an overall task completion rate of 76%. Using spatial, linguistic, and sentiment analyses, we show how agents perceive, adapt to, or struggle with their surroundings and assigned tasks. Our findings highlight the potential of TravelAgent as a tool for urban design, spatial cognition research, and agent-based modeling. We discuss key challenges and opportunities in deploying generative agents for the evaluation and refinement of spatial designs, proposing TravelAgent as a new paradigm for simulating and understanding human experiences in built environments.

Federated continual learning (FCL) allows each client to continually update its knowledge from task streams, enhancing the applicability of federated learning in real-world scenarios. However, FCL needs to address not only spatial data heterogeneity between clients but also temporal data heterogeneity between tasks. In this paper, empirical experiments demonstrate that such input-level heterogeneity significantly affects the model's internal parameters and outputs, leading to severe spatial-temporal catastrophic forgetting of local and previous knowledge. To this end, we propose Federated Tail Anchor (FedTA) to mix trainable Tail Anchor with the frozen output features to adjust their position in the feature space, thereby overcoming parameter-forgetting and output-forgetting. Moreover, three novel components are also included in FedTA: Input Enhancement for improving the performance of pre-trained models on downstream tasks; Selective Input Knowledge Fusion for fusion of heterogeneous local knowledge on the server side; and Best Global Prototype Selection for finding the best anchor point for each class in the feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedTA not only outperforms existing FCL methods but also effectively preserves the relative positions of features, remaining unaffected by spatial and temporal changes.

This paper presents the Visual Optical Recognition Telemetry EXtraction (VORTEX) system for extracting and analyzing drone telemetry data from First Person View (FPV) Uncrewed Aerial System (UAS) footage. VORTEX employs MMOCR, a PyTorch-based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) toolbox, to extract telemetry variables from drone Heads Up Display (HUD) recordings, utilizing advanced image preprocessing techniques, including CLAHE enhancement and adaptive thresholding. The study optimizes spatial accuracy and computational efficiency through systematic investigation of temporal sampling rates (1s, 5s, 10s, 15s, 20s) and coordinate processing methods. Results demonstrate that the 5-second sampling rate, utilizing 4.07% of available frames, provides the optimal balance with a point retention rate of 64% and mean speed accuracy within 4.2% of the 1-second baseline while reducing computational overhead by 80.5%. Comparative analysis of coordinate processing methods reveals that while UTM Zone 33N projection and Haversine calculations provide consistently similar results (within 0.1% difference), raw WGS84 coordinates underestimate distances by 15-30% and speeds by 20-35%. Altitude measurements showed unexpected resilience to sampling rate variations, with only 2.1% variation across all intervals. This research is the first of its kind, providing quantitative benchmarks for establishing a robust framework for drone telemetry extraction and analysis using open-source tools and spatial libraries.

Graph Mamba, a powerful graph embedding technique, has emerged as a cornerstone in various domains, including bioinformatics, social networks, and recommendation systems. This survey represents the first comprehensive study devoted to Graph Mamba, to address the critical gaps in understanding its applications, challenges, and future potential. We start by offering a detailed explanation of the original Graph Mamba architecture, highlighting its key components and underlying mechanisms. Subsequently, we explore the most recent modifications and enhancements proposed to improve its performance and applicability. To demonstrate the versatility of Graph Mamba, we examine its applications across diverse domains. A comparative analysis of Graph Mamba and its variants is conducted to shed light on their unique characteristics and potential use cases. Furthermore, we identify potential areas where Graph Mamba can be applied in the future, highlighting its potential to revolutionize data analysis in these fields. Finally, we address the current limitations and open research questions associated with Graph Mamba. By acknowledging these challenges, we aim to stimulate further research and development in this promising area. This survey serves as a valuable resource for both newcomers and experienced researchers seeking to understand and leverage the power of Graph Mamba.

Visual Text-to-Speech (VTTS) aims to take the environmental image as the prompt to synthesize reverberant speech for the spoken content. Previous works focus on the RGB modality for global environmental modeling, overlooking the potential of multi-source spatial knowledge like depth, speaker position, and environmental semantics. To address these issues, we propose a novel multi-source spatial knowledge understanding scheme for immersive VTTS, termed MS2KU-VTTS. Specifically, we first prioritize RGB image as the dominant source and consider depth image, speaker position knowledge from object detection, and Gemini-generated semantic captions as supplementary sources. Afterwards, we propose a serial interaction mechanism to effectively integrate both dominant and supplementary sources. The resulting multi-source knowledge is dynamically integrated based on the respective contributions of each source.This enriched interaction and integration of multi-source spatial knowledge guides the speech generation model, enhancing the immersive speech experience. Experimental results demonstrate that the MS$^2$KU-VTTS surpasses existing baselines in generating immersive speech. Demos and code are available at: https://github.com/AI-S2-Lab/MS2KU-VTTS.

Traffic flow prediction plays a critical role in the intelligent transportation system, and it is also a challenging task because of the underlying complex Spatio-temporal patterns and heterogeneities evolving across time. However, most present works mostly concentrate on solely capturing Spatial-temporal dependency or extracting implicit similarity graphs, but the hybrid-granularity evolution is ignored in their modeling process. In this paper, we proposed a novel data-driven end-to-end framework, named Spatio-Temporal Aware Hybrid Graph Network (STAHGNet), to couple the hybrid-grained heterogeneous correlations in series simultaneously through an elaborately Hybrid Graph Attention Module (HGAT) and Coarse-granularity Temporal Graph (CTG) generator. Furthermore, an automotive feature engineering with domain knowledge and a random neighbor sampling strategy is utilized to improve efficiency and reduce computational complexity. The MAE, RMSE, and MAPE are used for evaluation metrics. Tested on four real-life datasets, our proposal outperforms eight classical baselines and four state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (e.g., MAE 14.82 on PeMSD3; MAE 18.92 on PeMSD4). Besides, extensive experiments and visualizations verify the effectiveness of each component in STAHGNet. In terms of computational cost, STAHGNet saves at least four times the space compared to the previous SOTA models. The proposed model will be beneficial for more efficient TFP as well as intelligent transport system construction.

Performing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in low-visibility conditions, such as environments filled with smoke, dust and transparent objets, has long been a challenging task. Sensors like cameras and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) are significantly limited under these conditions, whereas ultrasonic sensors offer a more robust alternative. However, the low angular resolution, slow update frequency, and limited detection accuracy of ultrasonic sensors present barriers for SLAM. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end generative ultrasonic SLAM framework. This framework employs a sensor array with overlapping fields of view, leveraging the inherently low angular resolution of ultrasonic sensors to implicitly encode spatial features in conjunction with the robot's motion. Consecutive time frame data is processed through a sliding window mechanism to capture temporal features. The spatiotemporally encoded sensor data is passed through multiple modules to generate dense scan point clouds and robot pose transformations for map construction and odometry. The main contributions of this work include a novel ultrasonic sensor array that spatiotemporally encodes the surrounding environment, and an end-to-end generative SLAM framework that overcomes the inherent defects of ultrasonic sensors. Several real-world experiments demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of the proposed framework.