Urban Socio-Semantic Segmentation with Vision-Language Reasoning

Wang Yu, Yi Wang, Rui Dai, Yujie Wang, Kaikui Liu, Xiangxiang Chu, shengli

Urban Socio-Semantic Segmentation with Vision-Language Reasoning: 105 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #2 of 38 papers on 2026-01-16. Day-by-day upvote history. It lost 49 votes when the Hub removed votes in bulk.

As hubs of human activity, urban surfaces consist of a wealth of semantic entities. Segmenting these various entities from satellite imagery is crucial for a range of downstream applications. Current advanced segmentation models can reliably segment entities defined by physical attributes (e.g., buildings, water bodies) but still struggle with socially defined categories (e.g., schools, parks). In this work, we achieve socio-semantic segmentation by vision-language model reasoning. To facilitate this, we introduce the Urban Socio-Semantic Segmentation dataset named SocioSeg, a new resource comprising satellite imagery, digital maps, and pixel-level labels of social semantic entities organized in a hierarchical structure. Additionally, we propose a novel vision-language reasoning framework called SocioReasoner that simulates the human process of identifying and annotating social semantic entities via cross-modal recognition and multi-stage reasoning. We employ reinforcement learning to optimize this non-differentiable process and elicit the reasoning capabilities of the vision-language model. Experiments demonstrate our approach's gains over state-of-the-art models and strong zero-shot generalization. Our dataset and code are available in https://github.com/AMAP-ML/SocioReasoner.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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