SpatialVec: A Unified Representation Learning Framework for Geospatial Objects with Boundary-Aware Sampling
Spatial representation learning is essential for Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) applications, enabling machine learning models to capture the geometry, location, and spatial relationships of geographic entities such as points, polylines, and polygons. Existing spatial encoding methods often struggle to preserve fine-grained topological information, particularly for interactions involving complex geometries such as polylines and polygons. These approaches inadequately capture boundary structure and local spatial context, causing topology-sensitive relationships near geometry boundaries to be underrepresented in the learned embedding space. Consequently, accurately modeling complex spatial interactions remains a significant challenge for downstream spatial reasoning tasks. To fill the gap, we introduce SpatialVec, a boundary-aware spatial representation learning framework that adaptively samples geometry boundaries and their surrounding regions, capturing fine-grained geometric structures critical for topology-aware spatial reasoning. A transformer-based encoder-decoder trained through geometry reconstruction produces compact, geometry-aware, and unified representations for points, polylines, and polygons. Empirical evaluation on two real-world datasets shows that SpatialVec substantially improves the preservation of challenging topological relationships involving polygonal interactions and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly on downstream prediction and classification tasks.