NARA: Anchor-Conditioned Representation Learning for Heterogeneous Vector Geoentities

Vector geospatial data represent the world as discrete geoentities, such as roads, buildings, and points of interest, each with semantic attributes, geometry, and spatial relations to other geoentities, including metric proximity and topology. Existing methods for learning geoentity representations typically support a single geometry type or model only a subset of these relations, limiting their ability to capture spatial context across heterogeneous geoentities and support diverse downstream tasks. We propose NARA (Neural Anchor-conditioned Relation-Aware representation learning), a novel self-supervised representation framework for heterogeneous vector geoentities. NARA contextualizes geoentities through spatial-context-aware attention that models spatial autocorrelation using geometry distance modulated by topological relations across surrounding points, polylines, and polygons. NARA introduces masked geoentity semantic modeling and geometry-aware spatial relation modeling, as well as relation-conditioned regularization that encourages similar representations for geoentities sharing the same spatial relation to a common reference entity, while accounting for spatial autocorrelation. NARA's frozen, task-agnostic encoder outperforms state-of-the-art methods, each with an architecture tailored to its respective task, across traffic-speed prediction for polylines, building-function classification for polygons, and next point-of-interest prediction for points.