CartoVec: General-Purpose Location Embeddings from Open Map Data

Abstract:Geographic coordinates are common inputs in applied machine learning, but latitude and longitude describe position rather than the surrounding environment. Image-grounded location encoders learn this context from satellite or ground-level imagery; structured open map data offers another source of supervision whose utility for continuous coordinate encoders remains less explored. We introduce CartoVec, a coordinate encoder trained to predict Overture-derived land cover, land use, transportation, place and connectivity targets at multiple spatial scales, without image inputs or downstream-task labels. We evaluate frozen embeddings on Census outcomes, Airbnb prices and Philadelphia crime in the US Northeast using spatial block cross-validation. CartoVec has the highest mean performance on most Census outcomes and the highest average across the full suite, with several comparisons close across folds. The findings support open map data as a practical source of reusable location representations with a coordinate-to-vector interface that requires no map lookup at inference. The open-weight model is available at this https URL.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Geophysics (physics.geo-ph)

arXiv:2610.17190 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.17190v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.17190 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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