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
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.
By Livia Betti, Sebastian Ricke, Ivica Obadic, Adam J. Stewart, Esther Rolf
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
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
arXiv:2606. 02374v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Earth Observation (EO) has fundamentally transformed the monitoring of environmental processes and human activities up to planetary scale.
By Steffen Knoblauch, Hao Li, Gengchen Mai, Konstantin Klemmer, Song Gao, WenWen Li
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