Abhishek Singh, Giovanni Cuozzo, Alexander Jacob, Claudia Notarnicola
Accurate land-cover mapping from multimodal Earth observation (EO) data remains a challenge in regions where high-resolution annotations are scarce or costly to obtain. This work introduces a quantum convolutional encoder-decoder network for pseudo-label generation using Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery, guided only by coarse MODIS-derived land-cover maps. The proposed framework uses quantum-inspired convolutional blocks to enhance feature extraction and cross-sensor fusion, enabling the model to infer a fine-scale semantic structure from heterogeneous inputs. Experiments were conducted on the DFC2020 dataset, which provides a quadruple of Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 multispectral, low-resolution MODIS labels and high-resolution reference land-cover maps. The proposed training framework first learns a robust representation of multimodal inputs through the reconstruction branch before any supervision from low-resolution labels is applied. This self-supervised stage enables the model to capture a fine-scale spectral-spatial structure, which is then used to generate high-resolution pseudo-labels. These pseudo-labels are subsequently evaluated through classification metrics on the test data, demonstrating that the proposed approach produces more spatially coherent and class-consistent compared to classical baselines. The results highlight the potential of quantum-inspired deep learning to improve label generation in low-annotation remote sensing scenarios, offering a scalable path towards high-quality land-cover products for EO applications.
Mass religious gatherings such as the Kumbh Mela concentrate tens of millions of people into a single region over a few weeks, producing intense, repetitive, multilingual, and safety-critical demand for information. The default response, a conversational assistant that routes every query to a large language model (LLM), is poorly matched to this setting: it is costly at scale, slow on emergency paths, prone to hallucination on facts that can cause physical harm, and unusable when connectivity fails. We describe KumbhDoot, an agentic pilgrim assistant for the Nashik Simhastha Kumbh Mela built on a different principle. It operates on a foundational design principle that prioritizes semantic similarity over starting with an LLM. Generative models are invoked only in instances where similarity-based retrieval is insufficient to produce a correct answer. The system utilizes a "semantic cache": an embedding-indexed store as a single retrieval primitive, which handles intent routing, answer caching, offline lookups, and multi-agent retrieval. A custom three-tier agent architecture operates directly on this store, ensuring decision paths remain inspectable and avoiding the use of generic multi-agent frameworks that would trigger implicit per-step LLM calls. We present the architecture, an analytical cost model for its per-query economics, and an honest account of where similarity is sufficient and where generative reasoning remains necessary. We argue that for bounded, high-stakes, low-connectivity public-service domains, a similarity-first and LLM-bounded design is not merely cheaper but architecturally more appropriate than an LLM-default one.