Spatial Reasoning
STKDRec: Spatial-Temporal Knowledge Distillation for Takeaway Recommendation
Zhao, Shuyuan, Chen, Wei, Shi, Boyan, Zhou, Liyong, Lin, Shuohao, Wan, Huaiyu
The takeaway recommendation system is designed to recommend users' future takeaway purchases based on their historical purchase behaviors, thereby improving user satisfaction and increasing merchant sales. Existing methods focus on incorporating auxiliary information or leveraging knowledge graphs to alleviate the sparsity issue of user purchase sequence data. However, two main challenges limit the performance of these approaches: (1) how to capture dynamic user preferences on complex geospatial information and (2) how to efficiently integrate spatial-temporal knowledge from graphs and sequence data with low calculation costs. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-temporal knowledge distillation for takeaway recommendation model (STKDRec) based on the two-stage training process. Specifically, during the first pre-training stage, a spatial-temporal knowledge graph (STKG) encoder is pre-trained to extract the high-order spatial-temporal and collaborative associations within the STKG. During the second STKD stage, a spatial-temporal Transformer is employed to comprehensively model dynamic user preferences on various types of fine-grained geospatial information from a sequence perspective. Furthermore, the STKD strategy is introduced to adaptively fuse the rich spatial-temporal knowledge from the pre-trained STKG encoder and the spatial-temporal transformer while reducing the cost of model training. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that our STKDRec significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available at:https://github.com/Zhaoshuyuan0246/STKDRec.
Deep Learning for Spatio-Temporal Fusion in Land Surface Temperature Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey, Experimental Analysis, and Future Trends
Bouaziz, Sofiane, Hafiane, Adel, Canals, Raphael, Nedjai, Rachid
The rapid advancements in satellite remote sensing have enhanced the capability to monitor and analyze the Earth's surface. Among the many variables captured through satellite sensors, Land Surface Temperature (LST) plays a critical role in understanding key environmental processes. However, obtaining high-resolution LST data remains a challenge, as satellite sensors often face a trade-off between spatial and temporal resolutions. In response, Spatio-Temporal Fusion (STF) has emerged as a powerful method to integrate two satellite data sources, one providing high spatial but low temporal resolution, and the other offering high temporal but low spatial resolution. Although a range of STF techniques have been proposed, from traditional methods to cutting-edge deep learning (DL) models, most have focused on surface reflectance, with limited application to LST estimation. DL approaches, in particular, show promise in improving the spatial and temporal resolutions of LST by capturing complex, non-linear relationships between input and output LST data. This paper offers a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in DL-based STF techniques for LST estimation. We analyze key research developments, mathematically formulate the STF problem, and introduce a novel taxonomy for DL-based STF methods. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges faced by current methods and highlight future research directions. In addition, we present the first open-source benchmark STF dataset for LST estimation, consisting of 51 pairs of MODIS-Landsat images spanning from 2013 to 2024. To support our findings, we conduct extensive experiments on state-of-the-art methods and present both quantitative and qualitative assessments. This is the first survey paper focused on DL-based STF for LST estimation. We hope it serves as a valuable reference for researchers and paves the way for future research in this field.
Mask-RadarNet: Enhancing Transformer With Spatial-Temporal Semantic Context for Radar Object Detection in Autonomous Driving
Wu, Yuzhi, Liu, Jun, Jiang, Guangfeng, Liu, Weijian, Orlando, Danilo
As a cost-effective and robust technology, automotive radar has seen steady improvement during the last years, making it an appealing complement to commonly used sensors like camera and LiDAR in autonomous driving. Radio frequency data with rich semantic information are attracting more and more attention. Most current radar-based models take radio frequency image sequences as the input. However, these models heavily rely on convolutional neural networks and leave out the spatial-temporal semantic context during the encoding stage. To solve these problems, we propose a model called Mask-RadarNet to fully utilize the hierarchical semantic features from the input radar data. Mask-RadarNet exploits the combination of interleaved convolution and attention operations to replace the traditional architecture in transformer-based models. In addition, patch shift is introduced to the Mask-RadarNet for efficient spatial-temporal feature learning. By shifting part of patches with a specific mosaic pattern in the temporal dimension, Mask-RadarNet achieves competitive performance while reducing the computational burden of the spatial-temporal modeling. In order to capture the spatial-temporal semantic contextual information, we design the class masking attention module (CMAM) in our encoder. Moreover, a lightweight auxiliary decoder is added to our model to aggregate prior maps generated from the CMAM. Experiments on the CRUW dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to some state-of-the-art radar-based object detection algorithms. With relatively lower computational complexity and fewer parameters, the proposed Mask-RadarNet achieves higher recognition accuracy for object detection in autonomous driving.
Sims: An Interactive Tool for Geospatial Matching and Clustering
Zaytar, Akram, Tadesse, Girmaw Abebe, Robinson, Caleb, Bendito, Eduardo G., Devare, Medha, Chernet, Meklit, Hacheme, Gilles Q., Dodhia, Rahul, Ferres, Juan M. Lavista
Acquiring, processing, and visualizing geospatial data requires significant computing resources, especially for large spatio-temporal domains. This challenge hinders the rapid discovery of predictive features, which is essential for advancing geospatial modeling. To address this, we developed Similarity Search (Sims), a no-code web tool that allows users to perform clustering and similarity search over defined regions of interest using Google Earth Engine as a backend. Sims is designed to complement existing modeling tools by focusing on feature exploration rather than model creation. We demonstrate the utility of Sims through a case study analyzing simulated maize yield data in Rwanda, where we evaluate how different combinations of soil, weather, and agronomic features affect the clustering of yield response zones. Sims is open source and available at https://github.com/microsoft/Sims
MOL-Mamba: Enhancing Molecular Representation with Structural & Electronic Insights
Hu, Jingjing, Guo, Dan, Si, Zhan, Liu, Deguang, Diao, Yunfeng, Zhang, Jing, Zhou, Jinxing, Wang, Meng
Molecular representation learning plays a crucial role in various downstream tasks, such as molecular property prediction and drug design. To accurately represent molecules, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers (GTs) have shown potential in the realm of self-supervised pre-training. However, existing approaches often overlook the relationship between molecular structure and electronic information, as well as the internal semantic reasoning within molecules. This omission of fundamental chemical knowledge in graph semantics leads to incomplete molecular representations, missing the integration of structural and electronic data. To address these issues, we introduce MOL-Mamba, a framework that enhances molecular representation by combining structural and electronic insights. MOL-Mamba consists of an Atom & Fragment Mamba-Graph (MG) for hierarchical structural reasoning and a Mamba-Transformer (MT) fuser for integrating molecular structure and electronic correlation learning. Additionally, we propose a Structural Distribution Collaborative Training and E-semantic Fusion Training framework to further enhance molecular representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MOL-Mamba outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across eleven chemical-biological molecular datasets.
ST-ReP: Learning Predictive Representations Efficiently for Spatial-Temporal Forecasting
Zheng, Qi, Yao, Zihao, Zhang, Yaying
Spatial-temporal forecasting is crucial and widely applicable in various domains such as traffic, energy, and climate. Benefiting from the abundance of unlabeled spatial-temporal data, self-supervised methods are increasingly adapted to learn spatial-temporal representations. However, it encounters three key challenges: 1) the difficulty in selecting reliable negative pairs due to the homogeneity of variables, hindering contrastive learning methods; 2) overlooking spatial correlations across variables over time; 3) limitations of efficiency and scalability in existing self-supervised learning methods. To tackle these, we propose a lightweight representation-learning model ST-ReP, integrating current value reconstruction and future value prediction into the pre-training framework for spatial-temporal forecasting. And we design a new spatial-temporal encoder to model fine-grained relationships. Moreover, multi-time scale analysis is incorporated into the self-supervised loss to enhance predictive capability. Experimental results across diverse domains demonstrate that the proposed model surpasses pre-training-based baselines, showcasing its ability to learn compact and semantically enriched representations while exhibiting superior scalability.
A Skeleton-Based Topological Planner for Exploration in Complex Unknown Environments
Niu, Haochen, Ji, Xingwu, Zhang, Lantao, Wen, Fei, Ying, Rendong, Liu, Peilin
The capability of autonomous exploration in complex, unknown environments is important in many robotic applications. While recent research on autonomous exploration have achieved much progress, there are still limitations, e.g., existing methods relying on greedy heuristics or optimal path planning are often hindered by repetitive paths and high computational demands. To address such limitations, we propose a novel exploration framework that utilizes the global topology information of observed environment to improve exploration efficiency while reducing computational overhead. Specifically, global information is utilized based on a skeletal topological graph representation of the environment geometry. We first propose an incremental skeleton extraction method based on wavefront propagation, based on which we then design an approach to generate a lightweight topological graph that can effectively capture the environment's structural characteristics. Building upon this, we introduce a finite state machine that leverages the topological structure to efficiently plan coverage paths, which can substantially mitigate the back-and-forth maneuvers (BFMs) problem. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method in comparison with state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be made publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/Haochen-Niu/STGPlanner}.
Towards Kriging-informed Conditional Diffusion for Regional Sea-Level Data Downscaling
Ghosh, Subhankar, Sharma, Arun, Gupta, Jayant, Subramanian, Aneesh, Shekhar, Shashi
Given coarser-resolution projections from global climate models or satellite data, the downscaling problem aims to estimate finer-resolution regional climate data, capturing fine-scale spatial patterns and variability. Downscaling is any method to derive high-resolution data from low-resolution variables, often to provide more detailed and local predictions and analyses. This problem is societally crucial for effective adaptation, mitigation, and resilience against significant risks from climate change. The challenge arises from spatial heterogeneity and the need to recover finer-scale features while ensuring model generalization. Most downscaling methods \cite{Li2020} fail to capture the spatial dependencies at finer scales and underperform on real-world climate datasets, such as sea-level rise. We propose a novel Kriging-informed Conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model (Ki-CDPM) to capture spatial variability while preserving fine-scale features. Experimental results on climate data show that our proposed method is more accurate than state-of-the-art downscaling techniques.
Emma-X: An Embodied Multimodal Action Model with Grounded Chain of Thought and Look-ahead Spatial Reasoning
Sun, Qi, Hong, Pengfei, Pala, Tej Deep, Toh, Vernon, Tan, U-Xuan, Ghosal, Deepanway, Poria, Soujanya
Traditional reinforcement learning-based robotic control methods are often task-specific and fail to generalize across diverse environments or unseen objects and instructions. Visual Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong scene understanding and planning capabilities but lack the ability to generate actionable policies tailored to specific robotic embodiments. To address this, Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged, yet they face challenges in long-horizon spatial reasoning and grounded task planning. In this work, we propose the Embodied Multimodal Action Model with Grounded Chain of Thought and Look-ahead Spatial Reasoning, Emma-X. Emma-X leverages our constructed hierarchical embodiment dataset based on BridgeV2, containing 60,000 robot manipulation trajectories auto-annotated with grounded task reasoning and spatial guidance. Additionally, we introduce a trajectory segmentation strategy based on gripper states and motion trajectories, which can help mitigate hallucination in grounding subtask reasoning generation. Experimental results demonstrate that Emma-X achieves superior performance over competitive baselines, particularly in real-world robotic tasks requiring spatial reasoning.
EditSplat: Multi-View Fusion and Attention-Guided Optimization for View-Consistent 3D Scene Editing with 3D Gaussian Splatting
Lee, Dong In, Park, Hyeongcheol, Seo, Jiyoung, Park, Eunbyung, Park, Hyunje, Baek, Ha Dam, Sangheon, Shin, kim, Sangmin, Kim, Sangpil
Recent advancements in 3D editing have highlighted the potential of text-driven methods in real-time, user-friendly AR/VR applications. However, current methods rely on 2D diffusion models without adequately considering multi-view information, resulting in multi-view inconsistency. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) significantly improves rendering quality and speed, its 3D editing process encounters difficulties with inefficient optimization, as pre-trained Gaussians retain excessive source information, hindering optimization. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{EditSplat}, a novel 3D editing framework that integrates Multi-view Fusion Guidance (MFG) and Attention-Guided Trimming (AGT). Our MFG ensures multi-view consistency by incorporating essential multi-view information into the diffusion process, leveraging classifier-free guidance from the text-to-image diffusion model and the geometric properties of 3DGS. Additionally, our AGT leverages the explicit representation of 3DGS to selectively prune and optimize 3D Gaussians, enhancing optimization efficiency and enabling precise, semantically rich local edits. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, EditSplat achieves superior multi-view consistency and editing quality over existing methods, significantly enhancing overall efficiency.