AlphaEarth distinguishes cities but compresses urban variation
Cities differ in built form, land cover and development history, complicating comparison across places and time. Satellite foundation models map Earth's surface onto common numerical representations. Yet the tasks and targets used to shape them typically do not focus on cities: globally consistent labels for urban function do not exist, and many datasets - especially land cover and land use classifications - collapse the built environment into few classes. Here we audit the representation, focusing on AlphaEarth but with broader applicability to other Earth embeddings, by probing the geometry and geography of embeddings for 1,000 urban areas in 162 countries. We find that cities occupy a ...
| Authors | Andrew Renninger |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 24 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 September 2026 |
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