arXiv Machine Learning By Hao Tian, Heng Cai, Yifan Yang

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

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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.

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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 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
Oct 12

PlacePulse: Learning Transferable Place Representations from Structural Geographic Data

PlacePulse is a structural geospatial foundation model that transforms 572 attributes—expanded to 2,288 through H3 neighborhood aggregates—into 256‑dimensional unit‑norm embeddings for over a million H3 resolution‑7 cells across the United States. The model achieves high intrinsic reconstruction quality (mean $R^2 = 0.853$) and strong spatial organization (Moran's $I = 0.93$), while outperforming a dimensionality‑matched baseline on 74 held‑out targets from 12 external sources and competing with Google’s Population Dynamics Foundation Model on various health, economic, election, mobility, and social‑vulnerability outcomes. These results demonstrate that static structural composition can serve as a distinct and complementary modality for geospatial foundation models.

By Luc\'ia Garc\'ia-Duarte, Miguel \'Alvarez, Diego Vicente, Javier P\'erez Trufero, Javier de la Torre