Rethinking Multi-View Fusion for Urban Representation Learning

Urban region representation learning commonly combines heterogeneous data sources, such as mobility flows, points of interest, and land-use information, to support tasks including mobility analysis, public safety forecasting, and service demand estimation. Existing multi-view methods typically improve region embeddings by strengthening interactions across views. However, such methods often overlook view-specific regional structures and may propagate correlations induced by shared latent factors, which can reduce the stability of downstream predictions. To overcome this major limitation, we propose CURE, a confounder-aware framework for multi-view urban region representation learning. CURE first encodes each view with its regional graph structure, estimates a shared latent component, and then reduces its projected influence before cross-view interaction. A hierarchical graph-aware fusion module subsequently aggregates the residual view representations using local and global regional contexts Experiments on three real-world cities show that CURE improves predictive performance, remains robust under missing and noisy input views, and provides reliable cross-view integration through shared component separation and context-dependent view weighting.

Urban region embeddings have shown promising results in diverse urban sensing tasks such as crime, income, and service-call prediction. Recent methods improve representation quality by integrating mobility data with auxiliary modalities, using cross-view attention or contrastive objectives to align heterogeneous features into a unified region representation. However, leveraging the temporal dynamics of human mobility remains under-explored. Regional inflow and outflow fluctuate throughout the day, and inter-region connections emerge, persist, and dissolve over time. Moreover, prevailing fusion strategies combine views additively and miss the joint signal that emerges only when views co-occur. To address these gaps, we propose Mobility Stream-Structure Synergy (MoSS), which derives complementary views from mobility data: a Sequence view that preserves each region's hourly inflow/outflow profile, and a Structure view based on zigzag persistence diagrams that capture how regional connectivity emerges, persists, and dissolves over time. A synergy module then extracts emergent representations from the co-occurrence of these views through multi-degree interactions, explicitly capturing higher-order signal across views. Extensive experiments on New York City and Chicago show that MoSS achieves state-of-the-art performance across three downstream tasks using mobility data alone, outperforming baselines that rely on auxiliary modalities.

Recent advances in urban region representation learning have enabled a wide range of applications in urban analytics, yet existing methods remain limited in their capabilities to generalize across cities and analytic tasks. We aim to generalize urban representation learning beyond city- and task-specific settings, towards a foundation-style model for urban analytics. To this end, we propose UrbanVerse, a model for cross-city urban representation learning and cross-task urban analytics. For cross-city generalization, UrbanVerse focuses on features local to the target regions and structural features of the nearby regions rather than the entire city. We model regions as nodes on a graph, which enables a random walk-based procedure to form "sequences of regions" that reflect both local and neighborhood structural features for urban region representation learning. For cross-task generalization, we propose a cross-task learning module named HCondDiffCT. This module integrates region-conditioned prior knowledge and task-conditioned semantics into the diffusion process to jointly model multiple downstream urban prediction tasks. HCondDiffCT is generic. It can also be integrated with existing urban representation learning models to enhance their downstream task effectiveness. Experiments on real-world datasets show that UrbanVerse consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across six tasks under cross-city settings, achieving up to 35.89% improvements in prediction accuracy.