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Main Authors: Jia, Furong, Liu, Lanxin, Hou, Ce, Zhang, Fan, Liu, Xinyan, Liu, Yu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01910
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author Jia, Furong
Liu, Lanxin
Hou, Ce
Zhang, Fan
Liu, Xinyan
Liu, Yu
author_facet Jia, Furong
Liu, Lanxin
Hou, Ce
Zhang, Fan
Liu, Xinyan
Liu, Yu
contents Worldwide geo-localization involves determining the exact geographic location of images captured globally, typically guided by geographic cues such as climate, landmarks, and architectural styles. Despite advancements in geo-localization models like GeoCLIP, which leverages images and location alignment via contrastive learning for accurate predictions, the interpretability of these models remains insufficiently explored. Current concept-based interpretability methods fail to align effectively with Geo-alignment image-location embedding objectives, resulting in suboptimal interpretability and performance. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework integrating global geo-localization with concept bottlenecks. Our method inserts a Concept-Aware Alignment Module that jointly projects image and location embeddings onto a shared bank of geographic concepts (e.g., tropical climate, mountain, cathedral) and minimizes a concept-level loss, enhancing alignment in a concept-specific subspace and enabling robust interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce interpretability into geo-localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses GeoCLIP in geo-localization accuracy and boosts performance across diverse geospatial prediction tasks, revealing richer semantic insights into geographic decision-making processes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_01910
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Interpretable Geo-localization: a Concept-Aware Global Image-GPS Alignment Framework
Jia, Furong
Liu, Lanxin
Hou, Ce
Zhang, Fan
Liu, Xinyan
Liu, Yu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Worldwide geo-localization involves determining the exact geographic location of images captured globally, typically guided by geographic cues such as climate, landmarks, and architectural styles. Despite advancements in geo-localization models like GeoCLIP, which leverages images and location alignment via contrastive learning for accurate predictions, the interpretability of these models remains insufficiently explored. Current concept-based interpretability methods fail to align effectively with Geo-alignment image-location embedding objectives, resulting in suboptimal interpretability and performance. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework integrating global geo-localization with concept bottlenecks. Our method inserts a Concept-Aware Alignment Module that jointly projects image and location embeddings onto a shared bank of geographic concepts (e.g., tropical climate, mountain, cathedral) and minimizes a concept-level loss, enhancing alignment in a concept-specific subspace and enabling robust interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce interpretability into geo-localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses GeoCLIP in geo-localization accuracy and boosts performance across diverse geospatial prediction tasks, revealing richer semantic insights into geographic decision-making processes.
title Towards Interpretable Geo-localization: a Concept-Aware Global Image-GPS Alignment Framework
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01910