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
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 Machine Learning
Sep 29

Do Location Encoders Capture Spatial Effects? A GeoShapley Benchmark Across Scales

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