Research papers

Selected from my Google Scholar profile

Research Papers

Peer-Reviewed Papers

  • Liu, L., Marco Cipriano, Freya Tan, Alexandra Kudaeva, Andres Sevtsuk, & Gerard de Melo
    Observing the “Sidewalk Ballet”: Leveraging LLMs to Detect Social Interactions in Street-View Images
    CUPUM 2025 – Computational Urban Planning & Urban Management, London, UK.
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  • 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).
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  • Liu, L., & Andres Sevtsuk
    Clarity or Confusion: A Review of Computer-Vision Street Attributes in Urban Studies and Planning
    Cities, 150, 105022 (2024).
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  • 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).
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  • 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.
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  • Liu, L., Zhou, B., Zhao, J., & Ryan, B. D.
    C-IMAGE: City Cognitive Mapping through Geo-Tagged Photos
    GeoJournal, 81 (6), 817-861 (2016).
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  • 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).
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  • 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).
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  • Liu, L., Zhang, F., Zhou, B., Wang, Z., & Li, Y.
    STREETALK: A Navigation System for Pedestrians and Cyclists
    Landscape Architecture Frontiers (2018).
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  • 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).
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  • 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).
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(Additional Chinese-language papers are listed in the PDF CV.)

Papers Under Review

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

  • 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
    Submitted to TRB Annual Meeting 2026, under review (Manuscript ID TRBAM-26-00393).

  • 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, major revision invited (Manuscript ID CEUS-D-25-00395).

  • 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).

Manuscripts Completed (Not Submitted)

  • 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

Service & Grants

  • Reviewer for Cities, Nature Cities, Sustainable Cities & Society, Environment & Planning B, Journal of Transport and Land Use, Computational Urban Science, Landscape and Urban Planning, and others (20 + reviews).
  • Principal Investigator, “Observing the ‘Sidewalk Ballet’: Leveraging LMMs to Detect Social Interactions in Large-Scale Urban Imagery Datasets,” ACCESS CIS250088 (2025-2026).