# UrbanFeel: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Temporal and Perceptual Understanding of City Scenes through Human Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22228 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22228/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [Phi-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08905/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave: Tackling Multi-image, Video, and 3D in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07895/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10302/) (2024)
- [Building and better understanding vision-language models: insights and future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12637/) (2024)
- [Groma: Localized Visual Tokenization for Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13013/) (2024)
- [UrbanCLIP: Learning Text-enhanced Urban Region Profiling with Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18340/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning the City : Quantifying Urban Perception At A Global Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01769/) (2016)
- [The Multi-Temporal Urban Development SpaceNet Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04420/) (2021)
- [LOKI: A Comprehensive Synthetic Data Detection Benchmark using Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09732/) (2024)
- [Cross-view image geo-localization with Panorama-BEV Co-Retrieval Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05475/) (2024)
- [Where am I? Cross-View Geo-localization with Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17007/) (2024)
- [V-IRL: Grounding Virtual Intelligence in Real Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03310/) (2024)
- [CityGPT: Empowering Urban Spatial Cognition of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13948/) (2024)
- [UrBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models in Multi-View Urban Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17267/) (2024)
- [CityBench: Evaluating the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Urban Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13945/) (2024)
- [OmniCity: Omnipotent City Understanding with Multi-level and Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00928/) (2022)
- [SG-BEV: Satellite-Guided BEV Fusion for Cross-View Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02638/) (2024)
- [DynamicVL: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Dynamic City Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21076/) (2025)
- [UrbanLLaVA: A Multi-modal Large Language Model for Urban Intelligence with Spatial Reasoning and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23219/) (2025)
- [Semantic Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12867/) (2024)
- [The Change You Want To Detect: Semantic Change Detection In Earth Observation With Hybrid Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15683/) (2025)
- [FUSU: A Multi-temporal-source Land Use Change Segmentation Dataset for Fine-grained Urban Semantic Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19055/) (2024)
- [Leveraging BEV Paradigm for Ground-to-Aerial Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01812/) (2024)
- [CityPulse: Fine-Grained Assessment of Urban Change with Street View Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01107/) (2024)
- [Urban Safety Perception Assessments via Integrating Multimodal Large Language Models with Street View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19719/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [CityCube: Benchmarking Cross-view Spatial Reasoning on Vision-Language Models in Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14339/) (2026)
- [BLINK-Twice: You see, but do you observe? A Reasoning Benchmark on Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09361/) (2025)
- [MajutsuCity: Language-driven Aesthetic-adaptive City Generation with Controllable 3D Assets and Layouts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20415/) (2025)
- [CityRiSE: Reasoning Urban Socio-Economic Status in Large Vision-Language Models via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22282/) (2025)
- [Urban-ImageNet: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Urban Space Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09936/) (2026)
- [Persona Prompting in Multimodal Urban Perception: Descriptive Convergence and Interpretive Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29064/) (2026)
- [You Cannot Photograph the Same Street Twice: Reliability Limits in Vision-Language Measurement of Urban Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00649/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Urban development impacts over half of the global population, making human-centered understanding of its structural and perceptual changes essential for sustainable development. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various domains, existing benchmarks that explore their performance in urban environments remain limited, lacking systematic exploration of temporal evolution and subjective perception of urban environment that aligns with human perception. To address these limitations, we propose UrbanFeel, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of MLLMs in urban development understanding and subjective environmental perception. UrbanFeel comprises 14.3K carefully constructed visual questions spanning three cognitively progressive dimensions: Static Scene Perception, Temporal Change Understanding, and Subjective Environmental Perception. We collect multi-temporal single-view and panoramic street-view images from 11 representative cities worldwide, and generate high-quality question-answer pairs through a hybrid pipeline of spatial clustering, rule-based generation, model-assisted prompting, and manual annotation. Through extensive evaluation of 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs, we observe that Gemini-2.5 Pro achieves the best overall performance, with its accuracy approaching human expert levels and narrowing the average gap to just 1.5%. Most models perform well on tasks grounded in scene understanding. In particular, some models even surpass human annotators in pixel-level change detection. However, performance drops notably in tasks requiring temporal reasoning over urban development. Additionally, in the subjective perception dimension, several models reach human-level or even higher consistency in evaluating dimension such as beautiful and safety.