Zeping Liu

Zeping Liu

he/his

PhD Student of Geography

Zeping Liu

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Dr. Gengchen Mai. My research focuses on Geospatial AI and Intelligent Earth Observation, with an emphasis on geo-foundation models, spatial representation learning, and efficient large-scale high-resolution mapping.

I am the Amazon AI PhD Fellow (2025-2027)

CV Google Scholar Email

Selected Publications

  1. LocDiff: Identifying Locations on Earth by Diffusing in the Hilbert Space

    Zhangyu Wang, Zeping Liu, et al. Neurips 2025.

  2. GAIR: Improving Multimodal Geo-Foundation Model with Geo-Aligned Implicit Representations

    Zeping Liu, Fan Zhang, Junfeng Jiao, Ni Lao, Gengchen Mai. arXiv 2025.

  3. Towards the Next Generation of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence

    Gengchen Mai, Yiqun Xie, Xiaowei Jia, et al. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 2025.

  4. Torchspatial: A Location Encoding Framework and Benchmark for Spatial Representation Learning

    Nemin Wu, Qian Cao, Zhangyu Wang, Zeping Liu, et al. Neurips 2024 Dataset Benchmark.

  5. Four Seasonal Composite Sentinel-2 Images for Large-Scale Building Story Estimation

    Siqing Lyu, Chao Ji, Zeping Liu, Hong Tang, Liqiang Zhang, Xin Yang. Remote Sensing of Environment, 2024.

  6. CALIPSO-Based Aerosol Extinction Profile Estimation from MODIS and MERRA-2 with Transformer + CNN

    Yang Zhen, Xin Yang, Hong Tang, Haoze Shi, Zeping Liu. Science of The Total Environment, 2024.

  7. China Building Rooftop Area: A Multi-Annual High-Resolution Dataset (2016-2021)

    Zeping Liu, Hong Tang, Lin Feng, Siqing Lyu. Earth System Science Data, 2023.

  8. National-Scale Mapping of Building Footprints with Feature Super-Resolution Segmentation

    Lin Feng, Penglei Xu, Hong Tang, Zeping Liu, Peng Hou. GIScience and Remote Sensing, 2023.

  9. Learning Sparse Geometric Features for Building Segmentation from Low-Resolution Remote-Sensing Images

    Zeping Liu, Hong Tang. Remote Sensing, 2023.

  10. Building Outline Delineation from VHR Images with CRNN and Line Segment Information

    Zeping Liu, Hong Tang, Wei Huang. IEEE TGRS, 2022.

  11. Sequential Delineation of Rooftops with Holes from VHR Aerial Images

    Wei Huang, Zeping Liu, Hong Tang, Jiayi Ge. Remote Sensing, 2021.

  12. AFM-RNN: A Sequence Prediction Model for Delineating Building Rooftops

    Zeping Liu, Hong Tang, Wei Huang. Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision, 2021.

For complete records, please see my Google Scholar.

Industry Experience

Intern, Esri Inc. (Part-time)

19 Aug 2025 - 7 Nov 2025

Worked on the Spatial Co-Scientist project.

Intern, Esri Inc. (Full-time)

20 May 2025 - 8 Aug 2025

Developed Spatial Co-Scientist with Esri Generative AI Toolkit, combining RAG, LLM reasoning, and ArcGIS Pro workflows for practical spatial analysis; also collected expert interview insights and designed guided analysis flows.

Awards

  • IGIF Scholarship Award (2026)
  • UT Austin Dean's Prestigious Supplement Fellowship (2025)
  • Amazon AI PhD Fellowship (2025-2027)
  • Second Place, UT GIS Day Student Presentation Competition (2024)
  • Outstanding Graduate Student of Beijing, China (2024)
  • Zhou Tingru Geography Youth Award (2024)
  • First Prize, Graduate Academic Forum of National Remote Sensing Bulletin (2023)
  • National Scholarship, Ministry of Education (China) (2023)
  • National Scholarship, Ministry of Education (China) (2022)

Reviewer Service

  • ICLR 2025
  • KDD 2026 AI for Science Track
  • Scientific Reports
  • Earth Science Informatics
  • International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation
  • Signal, Image and Video Processing
  • Geocarto International
  • Frontiers in Remote Sensing
  • Geo-spatial Information Science

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