Organizations: School of Engineering and Technology, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), 100083, Beijing, China · School of Geological Engineering and Geomatics, Chang’an University, 710064, Xi’an, China
Abstract
Landslide investigation relies on sufficient and well-balanced observational data influenced by geological, hydrological, and anthropogenic factors. Available landslide inventories are often sparse and imbalanced, which limits understanding of triggering conditions and failure mechanisms. Data generation provides an effective approach to help capture feature dependencies from limited landslide observations. However, existing generation approaches for landslides often struggle to capture complex relationships among features and lack robustness across multiple scenarios and interacting factors. Here, we propose an accurate and robust approach for generating multi-feature landslide datasets by utilizing a tabular foundation model. By leveraging the capacity to learn from limited observations, the proposed approach effectively preserves the multivariate dependencies and statistical characteristics inherent in landslide occurrences. Comparative experiments on 20 landslide inventories demonstrate that the generated datasets closely align with observed distributions, maintain realistic feature dependencies, and exhibit robustness across different environmental contexts. This work provides an effective approach to overcome data sparsity and imbalance and strengthens landslide susceptibility modeling and risk assessment under limited observations.
Landslide susceptibility prediction is critical for geohazard risk assessment and mitigation. Conventional data-driven paradigm achieves high predictive accuracy but require sufficient conditioning factors and large-scale landslide inventories. However, in practical engineering applications across mountainous and plateau regions, data-scarce conditions are commonly observed, where such data requirements are rarely satisfied, rendering conventional data-driven paradigm inapplicable. To address this issue, we propose a knowledge-data dually driven paradigm for accurate landslide susceptibility prediction under data-scarce conditions. The essential idea behind the proposed novel paradigm is the integration of the geomorphic prior knowledge with scarce landslide data. To validate the proposed paradigm, we first applied it to a data-rich region in central Italy, where a conventional data-driven paradigm trained on the full dataset served as the baseline. By utilizing only 30% of the available landslide data, the proposed paradigm achieved comparable predictive accuracy to the baseline, demonstrating its effectiveness under data-scarce conditions. The paradigm was further evaluated in a genuinely data-scarce environment for application, the Qilian Permafrost Region of the Tibetan Plateau, where it also yielded reliable susceptibility predictions, confirming its applicability under data-scarce conditions.
Data-driven methods are widely used in landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) because they can effectively model the complex relationships between landslides and geo-environmental conditions. Existing data-driven approaches generally follow two types of data representations. Pixel-based models focus solely on the geo-environmental characteristics of a specific landslide but neglect the influence of its surrounding environment. Patch-based models incorporate surrounding spatial context but may include pixels with weak or no spatial relevance to the target landslide location. To address this limitation, this study proposes a Local-Geo and Spatial Context Fusion (LGSCF) strategy, which synergises the geo-environmental characteristics of landslide points with their corresponding spatial context through a feature-wise modulation mechanism. We tested the LGSCF strategy by integrating it into several representative convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, creating nine different LGSCF-based models. The primary study area covers approximately 2644 km2 across Jenai and Sinyi Townships in Nantou County, Taiwan, and the dataset comprises 5332 landslide samples and an equal number of non-landslide samples. The results show that LGSCF-based models consistently outperform their corresponding baselines, achieving F1-scores up to 87.09% and AUC values up to 0.9472. Furthermore, the susceptibility maps produced by LGSCF-based models show that known landslides are more accurately concentrated in "very high" susceptibility zones with fewer misclassifications. These findings demonstrate that our fusion strategy can significantly improve the accuracy of landslide susceptibility mapping.
Generating high-fidelity synthetic tabular data remains a critical challenge for enhancing data availability in privacy-sensitive and low-resource domains. Recent approaches leverage LLMs by representing table rows as sequences, yet suffer from two fundamental limitations: (1) they model feature dependencies densely, introducing spurious correlations; and (2) they assume static relationships between features, ignoring how these dependencies vary with feature values. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SAGE (Sparse Adaptive Guidance), a novel LLM-based generation framework that enforces sparse and dynamic dependency guidance. SAGE discretizes features into value-aware pseudo-features and constructs a mutual information-based sparse dependency graph. This graph adaptively guides generation through explicit context selection or implicit logit correction, enabling LLMs to focus on truly relevant information during synthesis. Our extensive experiments across six datasets and multiple tasks reveal that SAGE not only improves data fidelity and downstream utility, boosting F1 scores by 10% compared to previous LLM-based methods, but also reduces policy violations by one point. These results highlight the importance of adaptive structure in tabular data generation and provide new insights into context-sensitive control of LLMs.