Geospatial Representation Learning: A Survey from Deep Learning to The LLM Era

Understand

The ability to transform location-centric geospatial data into meaningful computational representations has become fundamental to modern spatial analysis and decision-making.

• Geospatial Representation Learning (GRL), the process of automatically extracting latent structures and semantic patterns from geographic data, is undergoing a profound transformation through two successive technological revolutions: the deep learning breakthrough and the emerging large language model (LLM) paradigm.
• While deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in automated feature extraction from structured and semi-structured geospatial data (e.g., satellite imagery, GPS trajectories), the recent integration of LLMs introduces transformative capabilities for cross-modal geospatial reasoning and unstructured geo-textual data processing.
• This survey presents a comprehensive review of geospatial representation learning across both technological eras, organizing them into a structured taxonomy based on the complete pipeline comprising: (1) data perspective, (2) methodological perspective, and (3) application perspective.