From Pixels to Patches: Pooling Strategies for Earth Embeddings

ArXi:2603.02080v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Geospatial foundation models increasingly expose pixel-level embedding products that can be downloaded and reused without access to the underlying encoder. In this setting, downstream tasks with patch- or region-level labels require a post-hoc aggregation step that maps dense pixel embeddings to a single representation. The default choice, mean pooling, discards within-patch variability and can underperform under spatial distribution shift. To study this setting, we.