Urban functional knowledge transfer through global representations amid uneven data
Junyuan Liu, Xinglei Wang, Guangsheng Dong, Hao Sha, Zichao Zeng, Zhicheng Deng, Jiazhuang Feng, Xiang Wang, Tao Cheng
Abstract
Urban functional observations are unevenly distributed worldwide, limiting analysis of how places are organised and used. AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) provides a globally consistent physical representation. Whether this representation can support transfer of functional knowledge to locations with sparse or absent functional observations, and what governs transfer, remain unclear. We introduce POI-aligned Urban Embedding (PURE), which learns physical-functional relationships between POI-derived semantics and AEF. Across five urban analysis tasks covering 142 countries and territories, PURE increases mean $R^2$ from 0.792 to 0.830, with gains across widely different levels of POI availability. When target-city POIs are excluded, country-level alignment retains 87.9% of its performance gain. Cross-country experiments show that transfer is selective rather than universal, with larger gains between physically similar and geographically closer contexts, particularly among pairs within the same continent. Our findings reveal spatially structured urban functional knowledge transfer, offering a route to reduce reliance on dense local observations.