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
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:2606. 13896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize.
By Julia Romero, Qin Lv, Morteza Karimzadeh
arXiv:2608.21761v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large collections of street-view imagery provide rich visual information about urban environments, but extracting fine-grained geographic information f...
By Changyu Lee, Yeonsoo Park, Abdullah Alfarrarjeh, Seon Ho Kim
arXiv:2608. 19766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised pretraining on remote sensing imagery typically treats all samples as equally informative, despite large variability in geographic and visual structure.
By Daniele Rege Cambrin, Francesco Rossi, Mattia Varile
Location encoders transform geographic coordinates into high‑dimensional embeddings for machine learning, yet it is unclear how well these embeddings capture interpretable spatial effects. This study benchmarks GeoShapley—a game‑theoretic explainer treating all location features as a single joint player—against eleven TorchSpatial encoders on a synthetic process with known coefficients, across grid, county, and global scales, with and without raw coordinates and under different training regimes. The results show that primary coefficient recovery is consistently high across encoders, while secondary coefficient recovery varies more with scale, especially at the global level, and raw‑coordinate baselines remain competitive throughout.
By Daniel Kiv, Shaowen Wang
GeoContext is a new vision‑language geolocation benchmark that introduces two tasks: GeoHint, where a model must localize an image given a coarse location hint, and GeoVerify, where a model must decide if an image was taken within 150 m of a claimed place. The benchmark builds a context ladder by stratifying nearby reference points by distance and referenceability, allowing the same image to be evaluated under varying context. Evaluation of five models on 109 sites in 30 cities shows that hint repetition is low, localization error grows with hint distance, and models struggle to achieve high discriminability in GeoVerify, with many false acceptances reported with high confidence.
By Yifan Zhang, Kai Wang
arXiv:2607. 19751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a regression-based approach to Arabic dialect geolocation that models dialectal variation as a continuous geographic space rather than discrete categories.
By Mohamed Aziz Khadraoui, Adel Ammar, Bilel Benjdira, Zahid Khan, Skander Turki, Wadii Boulila
arXiv:2610.07269v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Cross-view geo-localization is commonly solved as an image retrieval problem, matching a ground-level image against a database of satellite tiles thr...
By Ayesh Abu Lehyeh, Jay Hwasung Jung, Safwan Wshah
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:2608.29426v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reliable semantic representations derived from city-scale 3D models are increasingly important for urban analysis, infrastructure monitoring, autonom...
By Alexander Rusnak, Sophia Kovalenko, Jingru Wang, Ismail Moudden, Xiru Wang, Fr\'ed\'eric Kaplan
AlphaEarth, a satellite foundation model, maps Earth’s surface into numerical embeddings that allow comparison across places and time. An audit of its representations for 1,000 urban areas in 162 countries shows that cities occupy a distinct but overlapping region on the hypersphere, with continent, climate, and degrees of urbanisation explaining a portion of the variation. The study finds that cities in developing countries exhibit less contrast in vegetation and texture, and that annual changes in a city’s representation are largely driven by model updates rather than pixel changes.
By Andrew Renninger