cs.LGOct 22, 2026

Rethinking Multi-View Fusion for Urban Representation Learning

Authors: Sean Bin Yang, Zongyi Xu, Jilin Hu, Ying Sun, Kristian Torp, Bin Yang, Torben Bach Pedersen, Christian S. Jensen

Organizations: Aalborg University, Denmark · Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China · East China Normal University, China

Abstract

Urban region representation learning encodes heterogeneous urban signals, such as mobility flows, points of interest, and land-use patterns, into unified embeddings for downstream tasks, including check-in prediction, crime forecasting, and service demand estimation. Existing approaches rely on globally shared fusion and joint optimization, implicitly assuming uniform modality importance and naturally balanced multi-objective training. However, urban data is inherently heterogeneous. Our empirical analysis reveals two structural issues: (i) modality utility varies markedly across regions, causing static fusion to overemphasize signals from certain modalities; and (ii) heterogeneous objectives exhibit persistent gradient imbalance, causing representational bias and unstable training. We present PRISM, a self-adjusting framework for adaptive multi-view learning. PRISM adapts sparse MoE routing to learn region-specific view allocations, while a PID (Proportional Integral Derivative)-inspired regulation mechanism mitigates gradient conflicts during optimization. Experiments on three large-scale urban datasets show that PRISM achieves competitive performance compared with strong multi-view baselines, while providing more stable optimization behavior and more balanced region representations.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. When Correlations Mislead: Confounder-Aware Multi-View Urban Region Representation Learning

    Sep 14, 2026Sean Bin Yang, Ying Sun, Zongyi Xu +6Causal Representation LearningGraph Representation Learning

  2. Synergistic Fusion of Topological Structure and Temporal Semantics of Mobility for Urban Region Embedding

    Sep 8, 2026Namwoo Kim, Jeeyun Chang, Kanghoon Lee +1Feature Interaction ModelingGeospatial Representation Learning

  3. UrbanVerse: Learning Urban Region Representation Across Cities and Tasks

    Feb 17, 2026Fengze Sun, Egemen Tanin, Shanika Karunasekera +3Urban Representation LearningGeospatial Representation Learning