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

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.

OSMGraphCLIP: Learning Global Location Representations from OpenStreetMap Graphs

We present OSMGraphCLIP, a CLIP-style geospatial representation model that learns global location embeddings from freely available OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. OSMGraphCLIP represents geographic environments as heterogeneous graphs of typed OSM features, preserving the topological and semantic relationships among roads, buildings, land-use regions, and points of interest. A multi-scale graph encoder captures both fine-grained local structure and broader landscape composition, and supervises a spherical-harmonics location encoder through a contrastive alignment objective. We evaluate OSMGraphCLIP across a diverse suite of downstream geospatial regression and classification tasks spanning climate, ecology, socioeconomic indicators, public health, land cover, biodiversity, and wildfire forecasting, and show that structured OSM data alone supports strong global location representations across domains. OSMGraphCLIP matches or exceeds satellite-based baselines on the majority of benchmarks, with the most pronounced advantage on socioeconomic and public-health tasks, where OSM's explicit semantic annotation of the built environment encodes patterns of human activity that satellite pixels can only capture indirectly. On ecological and environmental tasks, the model remains closely competitive with imagery-based methods despite using no Earth observation data. Qualitative analysis confirms that the learned embeddings organize geographic space coherently, recovering biome boundaries, urban gradients, and tropical--temperate distinctions from map topology alone.