AI RESEARCH
Earth Embeddings Reveal Diverse Urban Signals from Space
arXiv CS.LG
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ArXi:2604.03456v1 Announce Type: new Conventional urban indicators derived from censuses, surveys, and administrative records are often costly, spatially inconsistent, and slow to update. Recent geospatial foundation models enable Earth embeddings, compact satellite image representations transferable across downstream tasks, but their utility for neighborhood-scale urban monitoring remains unclear. Here, we benchmark three Earth embedding families, AlphaEarth, Prithvi, and Clay, for urban signal prediction across six U. S. metropolitan areas from 2020 to 2023.