# Automated Feature-Topic Pairing: Aligning Semantic and Embedding Spaces in Spatial Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.11053 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11053/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [struc2vec: Learning Node Representations from Structural Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03165/) (2017)
- [Network Representation Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05852/) (2017)
- [Representation Learning for Attributed Multiplex Heterogeneous Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01669/) (2019)
- [SSP: Semantic Space Projection for Knowledge Graph Embedding with Text Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04835/) (2016)
- [Defending Water Treatment Networks: Exploiting Spatio-temporal Effects for Cyber Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12618/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Group-wise Reinforcement Feature Generation for Optimal and Explainable Representation Space Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14526/) (2022)
- [Traceable Group-Wise Self-Optimizing Feature Transformation Learning: A Dual Optimization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16893/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Feature Transformation for Polymer Property Performance Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15616/) (2024)
- [Automated Urban Planning for Reimagining City Configuration via Adversarial Learning: Quantification, Generation, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14699/) (2021)
- [Self-Optimizing Feature Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08044/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated characterization of spatial data is a kind of critical geographical intelligence. As an emerging technique for characterization, Spatial Representation Learning (SRL) uses deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn non-linear embedded features of spatial data for characterization. However, SRL extracts features by internal layers of DNNs, and thus suffers from lacking semantic labels. Texts of spatial entities, on the other hand, provide semantic understanding of latent feature labels, but is insensible to deep SRL models. How can we teach a SRL model to discover appropriate topic labels in texts and pair learned features with the labels? This paper formulates a new problem: feature-topic pairing, and proposes a novel Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based deep learning framework. Specifically, we formulate the feature-topic pairing problem into an automated alignment task between 1) a latent embedding feature space and 2) a textual semantic topic space. We decompose the alignment of the two spaces into: 1) point-wise alignment, denoting the correlation between a topic distribution and an embedding vector; 2) pair-wise alignment, denoting the consistency between a feature-feature similarity matrix and a topic-topic similarity matrix. We design a PSO based solver to simultaneously select an optimal set of topics and learn corresponding features based on the selected topics. We develop a closed loop algorithm to iterate between 1) minimizing losses of representation reconstruction and feature-topic alignment and 2) searching the best topics. Finally, we present extensive experiments to demonstrate the enhanced performance of our method.