Rethinking Multi-View Fusion for Urban Representation Learning
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
| Method | NYC | Chi | SF | |||||||
| MAE ( ) | RMSE ( ) | ( ) | MAE ( ) | RMSE | ( ) | MAE ( ) | RMSE ( ) | ( ) | ||
| Check-in | MVURE | 306.7±8.2 | 499.6±12.9 | 0.627 ± 0.019 | 1693 ± 74 | 3171+128 | 0.656 ± 0.029 | 346.8+8.7 | 659.3 ± 15.7 | 0.562 ± 0.021 |
| MGFN | 292.6±17.1 | 451.8 ± 28.1 | 0.690 ± 0.040 | 1281 ± 41 | 2276 ± 86 | 0.817 ± 0.011 | 310.8 ± 9.1 | 542.1 ± 17.6 | 0.708 ± 0.010 | |
| RDCL | 371.2±10.3 | 495.5 ± 15.9 | 0.471 ± 0.023 | 2427 ± 123 | 4184 ± 136 | 0.402 ± 0.042 | 398.8 ± 9.9 | 748.1 ± 17.8 | 0.437 ± 0.024 | |
| HREP | 276.3±11.7 | 448.2 ± 17.1 | 0.703 ± 0.021 | 1679 ± 71 | 3135 ± 79 | 0.664 ± 0.017 | 330.9 ± 9.3 | 606.7 ± 25.8 | 0.629 ± 0.032 | |
| BiST | 278.9 ± 4.7 | 442.6 ± 23.5 | 0.707 ± 0.001 | 1627.6 ± 32 | 2832 ± 49 | 0.725 ± 0.002 | 439.8 ± 8.3 | 704.9 ± 14.0 | 0.497 ± 0.008 | |
| Method | NYC | Chi | SF | |||||||
| MAE ( ) | RMSE ( ) | ( ) | MAE ( ) | RMSE | ( ) | MAE ( ) | RMSE ( ) | ( ) | ||
| Check-in | w/o RAR | 203.5 ± 1.6 | 331.1 ± 0.1 | 0.836 ± 0.000 | 1012 ± 21.8 | 2096 ± 52.0 | 0.850 ± 0.007 | 231.6 ± 31.4 | 435.1 ± 23.1 | 0.809 ± 0.020 |
| w/o UM | 210.3 ± 8.7 | 336.7 ± 12.7 | 0.831 ± 0.013 | 950 ± 21.4 | 2057 ± 19.3 | 0.856 ± 0.003 | 232.1 ± 12.5 | 444.6 ± 44.9 | 0.800 ± 0.040 | |
| w/o PID | 202.9 ± 2.6 | 315.5 ± 4.1 | 0.852 ± 0.014 | 975 ± 40.0 | 1973 ± 45 | 0.867 ± 0.006 | 237.3 ± 4.3 | 422.3 ± 18.4 | 0.820 ± 0.016 | |
| PRISM | 200.7 ± 4.8 | 315.1 ± 5.7 | 0.852 ± 0.005 | 819 ± 22.0 | 1677 ± 46 | 0.904 ± 0.006 | 204.0 ± 10.2 | 364.2 ± 15.0 | 0.866 ± 0.013 | |
| Crime | w/o RAR | 56.9 ± 3.1 | 76.5 ± 3.1 | 0.733 ± 0.022 | 78.5 ± 3.8 | 105.4 ± 3.7 | 0.642 ± 0.025 | 103.2 ± 5.9 | 179.3 ± 1.3 | 0.679 ± 0.005 |