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.

Amazon AI PhD Fellow · 2025–2027

CV Google Scholar Email

Selected Publications 12 entries

2026
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.
2025
LocDiff: Identifying Locations on Earth by Diffusing in the Hilbert Space
Zhangyu Wang, Zeping Liu, et al. NeurIPS 2025.
2025
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.
2024
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.
2024
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.
2024
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.
2023
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.
2023
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.
2023
Learning Sparse Geometric Features for Building Segmentation from Low-Resolution Remote-Sensing Images
Zeping Liu, Hong Tang. Remote Sensing, 2023.
2022
Building Outline Delineation from VHR Images with CRNN and Line Segment Information
Zeping Liu, Hong Tang, Wei Huang. IEEE TGRS, 2022.
2021
Sequential Delineation of Rooftops with Holes from VHR Aerial Images
Wei Huang, Zeping Liu, Hong Tang, Jiayi Ge. Remote Sensing, 2021.
2021
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 · Upcoming

Research Intern, Esri Inc.

Aug – Nov 2025 · Part-time

Continued work on the Spatial Co-Scientist project.

Research 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
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: May 20, 2026