MIND the Gap: A Geographic Implicit Neural Representation with Adjustable Spatial Scale

Abstract

Geographic measurements are often sparse, leaving large areas without labels for the quantities we want to map. Geographic implicit neural representations (INRs) address this by learning smooth, general-purpose embeddings that can be queried at any coordinate. Downstream models combine these embeddings with sparse labels to predict target values at unsampled locations without satellite imagery at inference. However, generalization to distant regions remains largely unexplored, despite its importance for remote sensing applications. We introduce Matryoshka Implicit Neural Distillation (MIND), which distills embeddings from specialist pretrained geospatial models into a single generalist coordinate embedding with adjustable spatial granularity. MIND uses nested supervision at several embedding dimensions, which define a series of contiguous chunks. In our experiments, early chunks capture coarser geographic variation, while later chunks add more fine-grained details. A downstream predictor can retain only leading chunks or be fitted with our Chunked Penalty to downweight later chunks while keeping the full embedding, without retraining the INR. To measure MIND and compare to existing approaches around the world, we introduce CoordBench, a large-scale INR evaluation suite of $52$ datasets and $78$ targets that aims to test both local interpolation and prediction in held-out regions at various spatial scales. MIND and its Chunked Penalty variant achieve the highest aggregate regression and classification scores among tested INRs, and the highest scores overall under regional holdout, setting a new state-of-the-art for geographic INRs.