Abstract
Understanding urban socioeconomic conditions through visual data is a challenging yet essential task for sustainable urban development and policy planning. In this work, we introduce \textit\{CityLens\}, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in predicting socioeconomic indicators from satellite and street view imagery. We construct a multi-modal dataset covering a total of 17 globally distributed cities, spanning 6 key domains: economy, education, crime, transport, health, and environment, reflecting the multifaceted nature of urban life. Based on this dataset, we define 11 prediction tasks and utilize 3 evaluation paradigms: Direct Metric Prediction, Normalized Metric Estimation, and Feature-Based Regression. We benchmark 17 state-of-the-art LVLMs across these tasks. These make CityLens the most extensive socioeconomic benchmark to date in terms of geographic coverage, indicator diversity, and model scale. Our results r