When Correlations Mislead: Confounder-Aware Multi-View Urban Region Representation Learning
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
Cross-view geo-localization is challenging due to drastic viewpoint changes and large appearance discrepancies between street-level and satellite imagery. Although existing methods often use geometric warping to expose co-visible cues, such transformations rely on restrictive spatial assumptions and inevitably introduce severe visual distortions under view-dependent visibility, yielding noisy supervision and fragile correspondences.
The paper introduces Mobility Stream-Structure Synergy (MoSS), a method that fuses two complementary views of mobility data—an hourly inflow/outflow Sequence view and a Structure view derived from zigzag persistence diagrams—to capture temporal dynamics and evolving regional connectivity. MoSS employs a synergy module that extracts higher‑order representations from the co‑occurrence of these views, moving beyond additive fusion. Experiments on New York City and Chicago demonstrate that MoSS outperforms existing baselines on three downstream tasks using only mobility data.
The paper introduces a multi‑view contrastive learning framework that creates low‑dimensional spatial embeddings by combining satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap data across Europe. These embeddings align with coordinate‑based encodings, allowing any dataset with latitude‑longitude pairs to be enriched with meaningful spatial features without needing the original spatial inputs. In case studies on French real‑estate prices and Belgian flood claim counts, models using the embeddings outperform those using raw coordinates, improving predictive accuracy and territorial risk classification while offering explainable spatial effects.
arXiv:2510. 13774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Forecasting urban phenomena such as housing prices and public health indicators requires the effective integration of various geospatial data.
arXiv:2607. 13558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Urban region profiling constitutes a core problem in urban computing, supporting applications such as population estimation, economic assessment, and environmental monitoring.
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.