Spatial Decision-Making & Brain-Inspired Spatial Intelligence
Modeling cognitive maps, route choice, revealed preferences, and spatial decision structures through inverse reinforcement learning and topology-aware AI.
Ph.D. Researcher · Human-Centered AI for Complex Systems
Spatial Intelligence, Urban AI, and Representation Learning
I study how humans and intelligent agents perceive, represent, reason, and decide in spatial and urban environments.
Research Identity
At the intersection of spatial cognition, urban AI, representation learning, and collective behavior.
My work connects geospatial machine learning, behavioral decision modeling, causal inference, and computational social science to build interpretable models of how people and artificial agents perceive, choose, and coordinate in space.
Research
Research Directions
Urban Complex Systems & Agentic Collective Intelligence
Designing agent-based and AI-native frameworks for mobility, economic behavior, dependency networks, and emergent coordination in cities.
Representation Learning for Spatial AI
Developing general spatial representations for AI systems, including n-dimensional positional encoding and geometry-aware embeddings across coordinates, images, videos, point clouds, and trajectories.
Spatial Reasoning & World Models
Building spatial world models for intelligent systems, enabling large language models to understand geographic knowledge, reason over spatial relations, and act within structured environments.
Education
Academic Training
New York University
Ph.D. in Human-Centered Technology, Innovation & Design
2025-present
Peking University
M.Sc. in Geography, Smart Cities and Big Data
2022-2025
Wuhan University
B.Eng. in Remote Sensing Science and Technology
2018-2022Publications
Publications
* Equal contribution · † Corresponding author
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems · 2024
Enhancing Pedestrian Route Choice Models Through Maximum-Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning With Individual Covariates (MEDIRL-IC)
Boyang Li and Wenjia Zhang.
Paper
ICML 2026
nD-RoPE: A Generalized RoPE for n-Dimensional Position Embedding
Boyang Li, Yulin Wu, Sizhe Xu, Nuoxian Huang, Zhonghang Yuan, Shangyi Guo, Shu Yang, and Takahiro Yabe.
Paper
arXiv · 2024 · precursor to nD-RoPE
GridPE: A Grid Cell-Inspired Unified Position Embedding for Arbitrary-Dimensional Spaces
Boyang Li, Yulin Wu, Nuoxian Huang, and Wenjia Zhang.
Paper
SIGSPATIAL 2026 · Under Review
LDP-DiffTraj: Diffusion Models under Local Differential Privacy for Personalized Human Mobility Trajectory Generation
Boyang Li, Shangyi Guo, Kota Tsubouchi, Toru Shimizu, Zhonghang Yuan, Joseph Y. J. Chow, and Takahiro Yabe.
SIGSPATIAL 2026 · Under Review
Behaviorally Grounding Large Language Models with Revealed Choices for Human Mobility Prediction
Boyang Li*, Sizhe Xu*, Donghak Lee, Shangyi Guo, Zhaonan Wang, and Takahiro Yabe.
ACM SIGSPATIAL · Vision Track
Towards the Convergence of Geospatial and Spatial Intelligence
Sizhe Xu*, Boyang Li*, Jing Tang*, Zhe Wang*, Takahiro Yabe*, and Zhaonan Wang*.
ACM SIGSPATIAL GeoAI Workshop · 2025
AskNearby: An LLM-Based Application for Neighborhood Information Retrieval and Personalized Cognitive-Map Recommendations
Luyao Niu, Zhicheng Deng, Boyang Li†, Nuoxian Huang, Ruiqi Liu, and Wenjia Zhang.
Paper
Travel Behaviour and Society · 2024
Varying Built Environment Contexts and Trip Chain Decisions: A Multinomial-Choice Gradient Boosting Decision Trees Analysis
Wenjia Zhang, Daming Lu, Hongjin Liu, and Boyang Li.
Paper
arXiv · 2024
PlanGPT: Enhancing Urban Planning with Tailored Language Model and Efficient Retrieval
He Zhu, Wenjia Zhang, Nuoxian Huang, Boyang Li, et al.
PaperRecognition
Grants & Fellowships
2025-2026
NYU Tandon School of Engineering Ph.D. Fellowship, fully funded
2024
Yi-Innovator College Student Social Innovation Grant
2024
Baidu Wenxin Cup Research Scholarship
2024
Peking University Long Yuan Chang Ze Scholarship
2023
Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School Tie Han Scholarship
2019 · 2021
Wuhan University First-Class Scholarship
2020
Wuhan University Hong Tu Chuang Zhan Scholarship
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