arXiv:2606.24997cs.LG2026-06被引 2

解析地理嵌入的隐藏信息,让神经网络理解地理位置的语义与结构。

What's in an Earth Embedding? An Explainability Analysis of Location Encoders

论文配图:What's in an Earth Embedding? An Explainability Analysis of Location Encoders
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用稀疏自编码器、语言概念和视觉特征分解位置嵌入
  • 揭示森林、沙漠、城市等地理结构,重建精度仍很高
  • 适合对地理数据可解释性感兴趣的科研与应用人员

地理隐式神经表示(INRs)可将地球任意坐标映射为位置嵌入,隐式编码空间数据于网络权重中。尽管位置嵌入被广泛作为通用地理表示使用,但用户缺乏系统工具来审计其包含的地理或语义信息。本文通过分析地理INRs的位置嵌入,将其分解为人类可理解的三类特征:(i) 稀疏潜在概念,(ii) 自然语言概念,(iii) 视觉特征。潜在概念通过稀疏自编码器学习;自然语言概念采用预定义地理词典上的稀疏线性概念嵌入(SpLiCE)恢复;视觉特征则通过CLIP Surgery生成的显著性图提取。结果显示,位置嵌入可被分解为人类可读表示,同时保持高重建能力,揭示出森林、沙漠、城市等可解释地理结构。不同方法暴露系统性差异,涵盖城市结构到生物群落与气候信号,预训练空间显著性图还凸显道路与地标等互补特征。本工作为可解释地理表示提供了初步探索。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

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. Location embeddings are widely used off the shelf as general-purpose geospatial representations, yet users lack principled tools to audit what geographic or semantic information these embeddings capture. In this work, we analyze the information content of geographic INRs through their location embeddings. We decompose these embeddings into human-interpretable features$\unicode{x2014}$namely, (i) sparse latent concepts, (ii) natural language concepts, and (iii) visual features. The latent concept embeddings are learned using sparse autoencoders. To recover natural language concepts, we apply sparse linear concept embeddings (SpLiCE) over a predefined geospatial dictionary. Finally, visual features are extracted using saliency maps derived from CLIP Surgery. We show that location embeddings can be decomposed into human-interpretable representations while retaining high reconstruction capability, revealing interpretable geographic structures such as forests, deserts, and urban features. Across methods, sparse decompositions expose systematic differences in encoded information, ranging from urban structures to broader biome and climate signals, and pretraining-space saliency maps further highlight complementary features such as roads and landmarks. We hope this work provides a first step toward interpretable geospatial representations.

地理嵌入可解释性神经表示空间分析

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