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. My research is supported by the Amazon AI PhD Fellowship Program (2025–2027).

Selected Publications 13 entries

  1. 2026 IJGIS 26

    Spatial CoT: A Spatial Concept Transformation Guided LLM Reasoning Framework for Complex Geospatial Question Answering

    Zeping Liu, Haiqi Xu, Ni Lao, Lauren Bennett, Liang Zhao, Mansour Raad, Hu Shao, Lynne Buie, Marshall Mueller, Cheng-Chia Huang, et al.

    International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2026.

  2. 2026 P&RS 26

    GAIR: Location-aware Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training with Geo-Aligned Implicit Representations

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

    ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2026.

  3. 2025 NeurIPS 25
  4. 2025 JAG 25

    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.

  5. 2024 NeurIPS 24

    TorchSpatial: A Location Encoding Framework and Benchmark for Spatial Representation Learning

    Nemin Wu, Qian Cao, Zhangyu Wang, Zeping Liu, et al.

    NeurIPS 2024 Datasets & Benchmarks.

  6. 2024 RSE 24

    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.

  7. 2024 STOTEN 24

    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.

  8. 2023 ESSD 23

    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.

  9. 2023 GS&RS 23

    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.

  10. 2023 RS 23
  11. 2022 TGRS 22
  12. 2021 RS 21

    Sequential Delineation of Rooftops with Holes from VHR Aerial Images

    Wei Huang, Zeping Liu, Hong Tang, Jiayi Ge.

    Remote Sensing, 2021.

  13. 2021 PRCV 21

    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

Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon

Jun – Sep 2026 · Full-time

SDE Intern, Esri Inc.

Aug – Nov 2025 · Part-time

Continued work on the Spatial Co-Scientist project.

SDE Intern, Esri Inc.

May – Aug 2025 · Full-time

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

Selected Awards

  • IGIF Scholarship Award2026
  • Amazon AI PhD Fellowship2025–2027
  • UT Austin Dean's Prestigious Supplement Fellowship2025, 2026
  • Second Place, UT GIS Day Student Presentation2024
  • Outstanding Graduate Student of Beijing2024
  • Zhou Tingru Geography Youth Award2024
  • First Prize, National Remote Sensing Bulletin Forum2023
  • National Scholarship, Ministry of Education (China)2022, 2023

Reviewer Service

Conferences

  • ICLR 2025
  • KDD 2026 (AI for Science Track)

Journals

  • ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
  • Transactions in GIS
  • Scientific Reports
  • Earth Science Informatics
  • Int'l Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation
  • Signal, Image and Video Processing
  • Geocarto International
  • Frontiers in Remote Sensing
  • Geo-spatial Information Science

Last updated: August 19, 2026