# A Hybrid State-Space Approach for Census-Tract Population Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30094 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30094/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

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- [Sensing population distribution from satellite imagery via deep learning: model selection, neighboring effect, and systematic biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02155/) (2021)
- [Fine-grained Population Mapping from Coarse Census Counts and Open Geodata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04039/) (2022)
- [Census-Independent Population Estimation using Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02839/) (2021)
- [So2Sat POP -- A Curated Benchmark Data Set for Population Estimation from Space on a Continental Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08524/) (2022)
- [Mapping Urban Population Growth from Sentinel-2 MSI and Census Data Using Deep Learning: A Case Study in Kigali, Rwanda](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08511/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sequence models---the architecture family behind large language models and, increasingly, state-of-the-art image recognition---have redefined how machines learn from high-dimensional data. Yet population estimation from satellite imagery, a task that underpins infrastructure planning, public health, and disaster response, has scarcely benefited: leading systems still bind population to a uniform raster, disaggregating census counts onto grid cells through weighting surfaces built from ancillary data (e.g., in WorldPop and LandScan), which can introduce systematic spatial bias, and predicting population per grid cell with convolutional neural networks. In this approach, the administrative-unit structure in which the census was actually collected is discarded. We close this gap with MambaPop, which renders each administrative unit as a single polygon-masked satellite image and treats tract-level population estimation as a sequence-modeling problem over its image patches, pairing each tract image directly with its population label and eliminating the disaggregation step entirely. Built on the hybrid state-space--attention MambaVision backbone, MambaPop is, to our knowledge, the first method to learn population directly from an administrative unit's own image as well as the first to apply a state-space based (Mamba) hybrid architecture to the population estimation task. Across all ~84,000 contiguous-US census tracts of the 2020 census, MambaPop attains a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1,141 persons per tract, matching the strongest convolutional baseline (YOLOv11, MAE 1,122).