GeoJEPA: Towards Eliminating Augmentation- and Sampling Bias in Multimodal Geospatial Learning
This addresses the need for more generalizable geospatial learning methods for urban planning and mapping applications, though it appears incremental as it adapts an existing architecture to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of biases in self-supervised geospatial representation learning by introducing GeoJEPA, a multimodal fusion model that eliminates reliance on augmentations and heuristic sampling, resulting in improved representations evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively.
Existing methods for self-supervised representation learning of geospatial regions and map entities rely extensively on the design of pretext tasks, often involving augmentations or heuristic sampling of positive and negative pairs based on spatial proximity. This reliance introduces biases and limits the representations' expressiveness and generalisability. Consequently, the literature has expressed a pressing need to explore different methods for modelling geospatial data. To address the key difficulties of such methods, namely multimodality, heterogeneity, and the choice of pretext tasks, we present GeoJEPA, a versatile multimodal fusion model for geospatial data built on the self-supervised Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture. With GeoJEPA, we aim to eliminate the widely accepted augmentation- and sampling biases found in self-supervised geospatial representation learning. GeoJEPA uses self-supervised pretraining on a large dataset of OpenStreetMap attributes, geometries and aerial images. The results are multimodal semantic representations of urban regions and map entities that we evaluate both quantitatively and qualitatively. Through this work, we uncover several key insights into JEPA's ability to handle multimodal data.