Measuring the Intrinsic Dimension of Earth Representations
Within the context of representation learning for Earth observation, geographic Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) embed low-dimensional location inputs (longitude, latitude) into high-dimensional embeddings, through models trained on geo-referenced satellite, image or text data. Despite the common aim of geographic INRs to distill Earth's data into compact, learning-friendly representations, we lack an understanding of how much information is contained in these Earth representations, and where that information is concentrated. The intrinsic dimension of a dataset measures the number of degrees of freedom required to capture its local variability, regardless of the ambient high-dimensional space in which it is embedded. This work provides the first study of the intrinsic dimensionality of geographic INRs. Analyzing INRs with ambient dimension between 256 and 512, we find that their intrinsic dimensions fall roughly between 2 and 10 and are sensitive to changing spatial resolution and input modalities during INR pre-training. Furthermore, we show that the intrinsic dimension of a geographic INR correlates with downstream task performance and can capture spatial artifacts, facilitating model evaluation and diagnostics. More broadly, our work offers an architecture-agnostic, label-free metric of information content that can enable unsupervised evaluation, model selection, and pre-training design across INRs.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Representation LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Measuring the Data
Measuring the Data analytically finds the intrinsic manifold in big data. First, Optimal Transport generates the tangent space at each data point from which the intrinsic dimension is revealed. Then, the Koopman Dimensio…
Dimensionality ReductionNo Location Left Behind: Measuring and Improving the Fairness of Implicit Representations for Earth Data
Implicit neural representations (INRs) exhibit growing promise in addressing Earth representation challenges, ranging from emissions monitoring to climate modeling. However, existing methods disproportionately prioritize…
FairnessHypothesis Testing based Intrinsic Evaluation of Word Embeddings
We introduce the cross-match test - an exact, distribution free, high-dimensional hypothesis test as an intrinsic evaluation metric for word embeddings. We show that cross-match is an effective means of measuring distrib…
Machine TranslationTranslationTwo-sample testingWord EmbeddingsEarthShift: a benchmark for measuring robustness to real-world distribution shifts in Earth observation
Current Earth observation benchmarks focus on measuring performance on diverse tasks and applications, typically measuring generalization in-distribution. But when models are deployed, they must generalize to myriad out-…
Characterizing AlphaEarth Embedding Geometry for Agentic Environmental Reasoning
Earth observation foundation models encode land surface information into dense embedding vectors, yet the geometric structure of these representations and its implications for downstream reasoning remain underexplored. W…