# SLED: Scalable Location Encoding via Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06612 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06612/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [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)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Learning Continuous Image Representation with Local Implicit Image Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09161/) (2020)
- [Functional Map of the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07846/) (2017)
- [GeoCLIP: Clip-Inspired Alignment between Locations and Images for Effective Worldwide Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16020/) (2023)
- [SatCLIP: Global, General-Purpose Location Embeddings with Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17179/) (2023)
- [AlphaEarth Foundations: An embedding field model for accurate and efficient global mapping from sparse label data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22291/) (2025)
- [GEO-Bench: Toward Foundation Models for Earth Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03831/) (2023)
- [Boosting Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning with False Negative Cancellation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11765/) (2020)
- [Towards Geospatial Foundation Models via Continual Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04476/) (2023)
- [Neural Plasticity-Inspired Multimodal Foundation Model for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15356/) (2024)
- [TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11171/) (2025)
- [TorchGeo: Deep Learning With Geospatial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08872/) (2021)
- [CSP: Self-Supervised Contrastive Spatial Pre-Training for Geospatial-Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01118/) (2023)
- [Geographic Location Encoding with Spherical Harmonics and Sinusoidal Representation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06743/) (2023)
- [Feature Guided Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Learning in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18653/) (2023)
- [Improving Image Classification with Location Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.03873/) (2015)
- [TorchSpatial: A Location Encoding Framework and Benchmark for Spatial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15658/) (2024)
- [TerraFM: A Scalable Foundation Model for Unified Multisensor Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06281/) (2025)
- [OlmoEarth: Stable Latent Image Modeling for Multimodal Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13655/) (2025)
- [Climplicit: Climatic Implicit Embeddings for Global Ecological Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05089/) (2025)
- [A Genealogy of Foundation Models in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17177/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [MIND the Gap: A Geographic Implicit Neural Representation with Adjustable Spatial Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25454/) (2026)
- [Planetary Feature Fields are Scalable Earth Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37784/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The plethora of readily available geospatial data offers exciting opportunities to learn high quality representations of the planet, but the sheer size of the Earth Observations (EO), differing modalities, and different sensor types pose significant challenges in doing so. Location encoders have emerged as an efficient way of compressing EOs into location-specific embeddings. However, current state-of-the-art location encoders rely on computationally expensive CLIP-style frameworks that require large batch sizes in the 16K--32K range, suffer from false negative samples, and scale poorly with additional modalities. We introduce the Scalable Location Encoder via Distillation (SLED), a distillation-based location encoder that uses geospatial location as a binding modality to pretrain location encoders with any modality of geospatial data. The resulting location encoder framework is lightweight, modular, and can flexibly incorporate multiple modes, while eliminating the need for spatiotemporal coregistration of samples. SLED is performant with batch sizes as small as 128, enabling pretraining at a fraction of the runtime and compute costs of current state-of-the-art models. We demonstrate our approach by pretraining unimodal and multimodal SLED models on Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Landsat imagery. We show that both unimodal and multimodal SLED models keep pace with or outperform existing approaches on a diverse set of 19 human-centric benchmark tasks and explore the benefits of using additional modes in pretraining.