arXiv Computer Vision

Do Satellites See Commuters? A Critical Benchmark of Vision Foundation Models

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
Jul 7

GeoFlow: Geo-Aware Modeling of Inter-Area Relationships in Origin-Destination Flow Prediction and Generation

arXiv:2607. 05257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Origin-destination (OD) flow modeling underpins urban planning and mobility analysis, but prevailing graph-based methods often neglect salient geographic attributes, limiting their ability to model long-range and multi-area dependencies.

By Zherui Huang, Guanjie Zheng, Hao Xue, Linghe Kong
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Temporal Sensitivity Analysis of Tessera Embeddings

The study evaluates how the length of observation windows affects the performance of Tessera embeddings for land‑use/land‑cover mapping. By freezing the encoder and recomputing embeddings from a full year down to a single day, the authors benchmark linear probes and UNet heads on LUCAS, DynamicEarthNet, and PASTIS‑R datasets. Results show that embeddings are highly task‑dependent: for phenology‑driven classes (PASTIS‑R) they outperform from‑scratch models by ~46%, while for temporally stable classes (DynamicEarthNet, LUCAS) they match only with full supervision, yet remain more label‑efficient across all datasets.

By Julia Guerrero-Viu, Alex L\'opez-Cifuentes, Ignacio P\'erez-Villar, Fabio Pacifici
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

MoRAX: Mobility-based Representation Augmentation for Geospatial Foundation Models

MoRAX is a lightweight framework that augments geospatial foundation model embeddings with functional structure derived from human mobility data. By incorporating mobility flows, MoRAX preserves the coverage and consistency of existing geospatial models while adding information about functional connectivity among urban regions, enabling zero‑shot deployment in unseen cities. Experiments across four cities in two countries show that the MoRAX teacher model outperforms baseline geospatial models on eight socioeconomic and environmental prediction tasks, and the student model—without direct mobility input—approaches the teacher’s performance.

By Ya Wen, Jixuan Cai, Yulun Zhou, Alec Kirkley
arXiv AI
Aug 10

SLED: Scalable Location Encoding via Distillation

arXiv:2608. 06612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The plethora of readily available geospatial data offers exciting opportunities to learn high quality representations of the planet, but the sheer size of the Earth Observations (EO), differing modalities, and different sensor types pose significant challenges in doing so.

By Kevin Lane, Zhongying Wang, Esther Rolf, Morteza Karimzadeh