arXiv Machine Learning

What's in an Earth Embedding? An Explainability Analysis of Location Encoders

arXiv:2606. 24997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geographic implicit neural representations (INRs) learn to map any coordinate on Earth to a location embedding, implicitly encoding geospatial data into the weights of a neural network.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

BEACON: Behavioral and Semantic Enrichment of AlphaEarth Embeddings through Tri-Modal Contrastive Learning

BEACON is a tri‑modal contrastive learning framework that enriches AlphaEarth embeddings by aligning physical representations from Earth‑observation imagery with semantic POI text and human behavioral POI visitation data, while keeping the deployed model image‑only. In a Houston case study, BEACON outperformed six baselines on nine downstream tasks, achieving up to 43% higher R² for obesity prevalence, 34% for poor mental health, and 22% for median household income under a linear probe.

By Hao Tian, Heng Cai, Yifan Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

MoRA: Mobility as the Backbone for Geospatial Representation Learning at Scale

MoRA is a human‑centric geospatial representation learning framework that uses a large mobility graph as its backbone to fuse spatial tokenization, graph neural networks, and asymmetric contrastive learning. It aligns over 100 million points of interest, massive remote sensing imagery, and structured demographic data with a billion‑edge mobility graph, producing compact 128‑dimensional embeddings that capture socio‑economic context and functional roles of locations. On a benchmark of nine downstream social and economic prediction tasks, MoRA outperforms state‑of‑the‑art models by an average of 12.9% and demonstrates scaling behavior analogous to large language models.

By Ya Wen, Jixuan Cai, Qiyao Ma, Linyan Li, Xinhua Chen, Chris Webster, Yulun Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

A multi-view contrastive learning framework for spatial embeddings in risk modelling

The paper introduces a multi‑view contrastive learning framework that creates low‑dimensional spatial embeddings by combining satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap data across Europe. These embeddings align with coordinate‑based encodings, allowing any dataset with latitude‑longitude pairs to be enriched with meaningful spatial features without needing the original spatial inputs. In case studies on French real‑estate prices and Belgian flood claim counts, models using the embeddings outperform those using raw coordinates, improving predictive accuracy and territorial risk classification while offering explainable spatial effects.

By Freek Holvoet, Christopher Blier-Wong, Katrien Antonio
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 4

Geo-Embed: Towards Unified Multimodal Embeddings for Urban Understanding

Geospatial and urban applications increasingly require models to compare heterogeneous evidence across street-view imagery, remote-sensing observations, text descriptions, region proposals, and temporal change cues. However, existing multimodal embedding models and benchmarks are still largely designed and evaluated around general-purpose image-text matching, leaving unclear whether unified embedding space can support heterogeneous geospatial tasks involving spatial relationships, fine-grained semantics, and temporal changes.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

MIND the Gap: A Geographic Implicit Neural Representation with Adjustable Spatial Scale

The paper introduces MIND, a method that distills specialist geospatial model embeddings into a single generalist coordinate embedding with adjustable spatial granularity, using nested supervision across multiple embedding dimensions. MIND’s design allows downstream predictors to use only leading chunks or apply a Chunked Penalty to downweight finer details without retraining the INR. The authors evaluate MIND on CoordBench, a large INR benchmark of 52 datasets and 78 targets, and report that MIND and its Chunked Penalty variant achieve the highest regression and classification scores, especially under regional holdout, establishing a new state‑of‑the‑art for geographic implicit neural representations.

By Isaac Corley, Arjun Rao, Esther Rolf, Konstantin Klemmer, Evan Shelhamer, Nils Lehmann, Marc Ru{\ss}wurm, Gengchen Mai, Nathan Jacobs, Hannah Kerner
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

GTPred: Benchmarking MLLMs for Interpretable Geo-localization and Time-of-capture Prediction

GTPred is a new benchmark for geo‑temporal prediction that evaluates multi‑modal large language models (MLLMs) on 370 images taken across 120 years worldwide. It assesses predictions by matching both the year and a hierarchical location sequence, and includes annotated reasoning chains to test intermediate reasoning. Experiments on 15 MLLMs show that while visual perception is strong, models still lack world knowledge and geo‑temporal reasoning, and that adding temporal data improves location inference.

By Jinnao Li, Tingzhu Chen, Changbo Wang