AI RESEARCH
What on Earth is AlphaEarth? Hierarchical structure and functional interpretability for global land cover
arXiv CS.LG
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ArXi:2603.16911v1 Announce Type: new Geospatial foundation models generate high-dimensional embeddings that achieve strong predictive performance, yet their internal organization remains obscure, limiting their scientific use. Recent interpretability studies relate Google AlphaEarth Foundations (GAEF) embeddings to continuous environmental variables, but it is still unclear whether the embedding space exhibits a functional or hierarchical organization, in which some dimensions act as specialized representations while others encode shared or broader geospatial structure.