Urban Socio-Semantic Segmentation with Vision-Language Reasoning

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 \textbf{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 \textbf{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 significant gains over state-of-the-art models and strong zero-shot generalization. The dataset and code will be made publicly available.