# Rethinking Amortized Neural Representations for High-Resolution Terrain Elevation Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00404 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00404/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [HyperNetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09106/) (2016)
- [Scene Representation Networks: Continuous 3D-Structure-Aware Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01618/) (2019)
- [Learned Initializations for Optimizing Coordinate-Based Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02189/) (2020)
- [COIN: COmpression with Implicit Neural representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03123/) (2021)
- [From data to functa: Your data point is a function and you can treat it like one](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12204/) (2022)
- [Implicit Neural Representations for Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04267/) (2021)
- [Transformers as Meta-Learners for Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02801/) (2022)
- [COOL-CHIC: Coordinate-based Low Complexity Hierarchical Image Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05458/) (2022)
- [Generalizable Implicit Neural Representations via Instance Pattern Composers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13223/) (2022)
- [INCODE: Implicit Neural Conditioning with Prior Knowledge Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18846/) (2023)
- [ImplicitTerrain: a Continuous Surface Model for Terrain Data Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00227/) (2024)
- [Implicit Neural Representation Facilitates Unified Universal Vision Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14256/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Implicit neural representations (INRs) model a signal as a continuous coordinate-to-value function. For terrain elevation data, this supports analytic derivatives, arbitrary-resolution decoding, and a smooth surface model of the underlying heightfield. However, fitting and storing a separate INR for every tile does not scale to large terrain datasets. Amortized neural representations reduce this cost with a shared network: a new tile is mapped to a compact per-tile payload, and a shared decoder reconstructs the heightfield from it. Most such methods are hypernetworks that predict the payload in a single forward pass, while others recover it through a short per-tile optimization. These methods were developed primarily for natural images, and their suitability for terrain heightfields remains unclear. We introduce a controlled benchmark on a 1 m/pixel terrain dataset and evaluate three representative methods under a unified protocol. Observing a clear cross-domain gap, we propose HUVR+SIREN, a hypernetwork that adapts the strongest benchmarked method (HUVR) by replacing its coordinate decoder with a smooth, analytically differentiable one. It attains the best height and derivative fidelity on the benchmark with no additional per-tile storage and lower decode cost, and tolerates aggressive post-training quantization with negligible quality loss, giving a compact terrain neural format. Ablations and diagnostics further identify which design choices transfer to terrain and show that the per-tile bottleneck is already near its useful limit, leaving the remaining gap in the shared hypernetwork's architectural design.