What on Earth is AlphaEarth? Hierarchical structure and functional interpretability for global land cover
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. In this work, we propose a functional interpretability framework that reverse-engineers the role of embedding dimensions by characterizing their contribution...
| Authors | Ivan Felipe Benavides-Martinez, Justin Guthrie, Jhon Edwin Arias et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 8 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 March 2026 |
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