PlacePulse: Learning Transferable Place Representations from Structural Geographic Data

Lucía García-Duarte, Miguel Álvarez, Diego Vicente, Javier Pérez Trufero, Javier de la Torre

Geospatial machine learning often depends on task-specific feature engineering over large collections of sociodemographic, business, and environmental variables. Geospatial foundation models offer reusable representations of place, but leading approaches typically encode dynamic signals, such as mobility and search activity, or visual signals from satellite imagery. Few models represent the static structural composition of places (who lives and works there, which businesses operate there, and which risks they face) as transferable embeddings at fine spatial resolution. We introduce PlacePulse, a structural geospatial foundation model that compresses 572 attributes, expanded to 2,288 inputs through H3 neighborhood aggregates, into 256-dimensional unit-norm embeddings for 1,055,537 H3 resolution-7 cells in the United States. We also introduce a reusable two-axis benchmark that separates intrinsic representation quality from downstream predictive utility across multiple targets and spatial supports. Intrinsically, the embeddings reconstruct standardized inputs with mean $R^2 = 0.853$, use 251 of 256 approximately decorrelated dimensions, and show strong spatial organization, with…