Research papers

Selected from my Google Scholar profile

Usually I do not update this page frequently. For the most recent publication list, please refer to my Curriculum Vitae and Google Scholar profile.

Peer-Reviewed Papers

  • Sevtsuk, A., Basu, R., Liu, L., Alhassan, A., & Kollar, J.
    NYC Walks: A City-Wide Foot-Traffic Model to Guide Pedestrian-Oriented Planning and Design
    Accepted by Nature Cities.

  • Liu, Z., Gao, X., Niu, F., Gao, Q., Liu, L., & Piramuthu, R. START: Spatial and Textual Learning for Chart Understanding Accepted by WACV 2026.

  • Liu, L., Kudaeva, A., Cipriano, M., Al Ghannam, F., Tan, F., de Melo, G., & Sevtsuk, A.
    MINGLE: VLMs for Semantically Complex Region Detection
    Accepted by AAAI 2026 – Artificial Intelligence for Social Impact Track

  • Kang, Y., Chen, J., Liu, L., Sharma, K., Mazzarello, M., Mora, S., Duarte, F.* (corresp.), & Ratti, C.
    Human vs. AI Safety Perception? Decoding Human Safety Perception with Eye-Tracking Systems, Street-View Images, and Explainable AI
    Computers, Environment & Urban Systems, (Accepted Manuscript ID CEUS-D-25-00395).

  • Liu, L., & Andres Sevtsuk
    Clarity or Confusion: A Review of Computer-Vision Street Attributes in Urban Studies and Planning
    Cities, 150, 105022 (2024).
    View

  • Colaninno, N., Rounaq Basu, Maryam Hosseini, Abdulaziz Alhassan, Liu Liu, & Andres Sevtsuk
    A Sidewalk-Level Urban Heat-Risk Assessment Framework Using Pedestrian Mobility and Urban Micro-climate Modelling
    Environment & Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science (2024).
    View

  • Zhou, B., Liu, L., Oliva, A., & Torralba, A.
    Recognizing City Identity via Attribute Analysis of Geo-Tagged Images
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2014), pp. 519-534.
    Download

  • Liu, L., Zhou, B., Zhao, J., & Ryan, B. D.
    C-IMAGE: City Cognitive Mapping through Geo-Tagged Photos
    GeoJournal, 81 (6), 817-861 (2016).
    View

  • Long, Y., & Liu, L.
    How Green Are the Streets? An Analysis for Central Areas of Chinese Cities Using Tencent Street View
    PLOS ONE, 12 (2), e0171110 (2017).
    Download

  • Zhang, F., Zhou, B., Liu, L., Liu, Y., Fung, H. H., Lin, H., & Carlo Ratti
    Measuring Human Perceptions of a Large-Scale Urban Region Using Machine Learning
    Landscape and Urban Planning, 180, 148-160 (2018).
    View

  • Liu, L., Zhang, F., Zhou, B., Wang, Z., & Li, Y.
    STREETALK: A Navigation System for Pedestrians and Cyclists
    Landscape Architecture Frontiers (2018).
    Download

  • Cui, C., et al.
    The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Daily Inter-City Mobility in the Yangtze River Delta: An Analysis Using Big Data
    Habitat International (2020).
    View

  • Zhang, D., Yi, H., Chen, Y., Jiang, N., Shao, J., & Liu, L.
    An Urban Infrastructure Assessment System Built on Geo-Tagged Images and Machine Learning
    Computational Urban Science 2 (1), 1-21 (2022).
    Download

Papers Under Review

  • Zhang, H., Liu, L., Wang, P., & Zhao, J.
    Depicting the Blurred Regional Boundaries in China Using Individual Mobility Data
    Computational Urban Science, under review (Manuscript ID CUSC-D-25-00097).

Preprint

  • Hosseini, M., Cipriano, M., Eslami, S., Hodczak, D., Liu, L., Sevtsuk, A., & de Melo, G.
    ELSA: Evaluating Localization of Social Activities in Urban Streets
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.01551 (2024).
    Download

Manuscripts Completed (No Submission)

  • Liu, L., Gao, X., Gao, Q., & Piramuthu, R.
    Exploring the Challenges of Humanity’s Last Exam Dataset Analysis, Small Model Evaluation, and Enhancement Trials
    Completed during Applied Scientist PhD Internship, Amazon AGI, Sunnyvale CA (2025).
    View upon request

  • Liu, L., Gao, X., Gao, Q., & Piramuthu, R.
    ABCxM: A Benchmark for Multimodal Models Playing Scores to Music
    Completed during Applied Scientist PhD Internship, Amazon AGI, Sunnyvale CA (2024).
    Developed the first end-to-end benchmark and evaluation framework for notation-to-music generation.
    View upon request

  • Liu, L., Gao, X., Gao, Q., & Piramuthu, R.
    VIS: A Benchmark for Foley Models and Visually Indicative Sounds
    Completed during Applied Scientist PhD Internship, Amazon AGI, Sunnyvale CA (2024).
    Created human-annotated, multi-domain datasets for evaluating video-to-audio generation models.
    View upon request

Additional papers writtern in Chinese are listed in the Curriculum Vitae only.

Service & Grants

  • Co-Investigator (Subproject PI), National Key Research and Development Program of China — “Multi-dimensional Street Quality Enhancement and Coordinated Control Technology Platform Construction” (Subproject: 2023YFC3805305-03, PI: Liu Liu, Suzhou Citory Technology Co., Ltd.), Funding Period: December 2023 – November 2026.

  • Principal Investigator, “Observing the ‘Sidewalk Ballet’: Leveraging LMMs to Detect Social Interactions in Large-Scale Urban Imagery Datasets,” ACCESS CIS250088 (2025-2026).

  • Co-Principal Investigator, Moments: Leveraging Continuous Visual and Auditory Experiences to Assess Urban Attraction (CIS250360), Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), Alexandria, VA, US, Funding Period: October 2025 – October 2026 [↗]

  • Reviewer for Cities, Nature Cities, Sustainable Cities & Society, Environment & Planning B, Journal of Transport and Land Use, Transactions in Urban Data, Science, and Technology, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Computational Urban Science, Landscape and Urban Planning, International Journal of Digital Earth, and others (20 + reviews).