A Weak Supervision Learning Approach Towards an Equitable Parking Lot Occupancy Estimation

The scarcity and high cost of labeled high-resolution imagery have long challenged remote sensing applications, particularly in low-income regions where high-resolution data are scarce. In this study, we propose a weak supervision framework that estimates parking lot occupancy using 3m resolution satellite imagery. By leveraging coarse temporal labels -- based on the assumption that parking lots of major supermarkets and hardware stores in Germany are typically full on Saturdays and empty on Sundays -- we train a pairwise comparison model that achieves an AUC of 0.92 on large parking lots. The proposed approach minimizes the reliance on expensive high-resolution images and holds promise for scalable urban mobility analysis. Moreover, the method can be adapted to assess transit patterns and resource allocation in vulnerable communities, providing a data-driven basis to improve the well-being of those most in need.

Self-Supervision in Time for Satellite Images: A novel method of SSL technique in Satellite images

With the limited availability of labeled data with various atmospheric conditions in remote sensing images, it seems useful to work with self-supervised algorithms. Few pretext-based algorithms, including from rotation, spatial context and jigsaw puzzles are not appropriate for satellite images. Often, satellite images have a higher temporal frequency. So, the temporal dimension of remote sensing data provides natural augmentation without requiring us to create artificial augmentation of images. Here, we propose S3-TSS, a novel method of self-supervised learning technique that leverages natural augmentation occurring in temporal dimension. We compare our results with current state-of-the-art methods and also perform various experiments. We observed that our method was able to perform better than baseline SeCo in four downstream datasets. Code for our work can be found here: https://github.com/hewanshrestha/Why-Self-Supervision-in-Time

LLMRS: Unlocking Potentials of LLM-Based Recommender Systems for Software Purchase

Recommendation systems are ubiquitous, from Spotify playlist suggestions to Amazon product suggestions. Nevertheless, depending on the methodology or the dataset, these systems typically fail to capture user preferences and generate general recommendations. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLM) offer promising results for analyzing user queries. However, employing these models to capture user preferences and efficiency remains an open question. In this paper, we propose LLMRS, an LLM-based zero-shot recommender system where we employ pre-trained LLM to encode user reviews into a review score and generate user-tailored recommendations. We experimented with LLMRS on a real-world dataset, the Amazon product reviews, for software purchase use cases. The results show that LLMRS outperforms the ranking-based baseline model while successfully capturing meaningful information from product reviews, thereby providing more reliable recommendations.