arXiv Computer Vision By Peiwen Zhang, Kristie Hu, Jovana Knezevic, Shunde Yin, Kyle Gao

Recoverable Geographic Location Information in Earth-Observation Embeddings

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The study evaluates whether Earth‑observation foundation models encode geographic location information by attempting to predict coordinates from their embeddings. Using 284 verified European solar farms, the authors tested Tessera v1, Tessera v1.1, and AlphaEarth, finding that all three models contain recoverable geographic data. AlphaEarth showed the strongest correlation between embedding distance and geographic distance, while both Tessera variants outperformed Sentinel‑2 controls, suggesting that geographic information should be considered when auditing such models.

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