EASTAR: Event-Anchored Semantic and Task-Adaptive Region Representation Learning

arXiv:2611.14990v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Urban region representation learning supports a wide range of urban analytics tasks by encoding regional functions and interactions, with human mobility serving as a central signal because it directly captures inter-region interactions. However, most mobility-based methods learn from aggregated origin-destination matrices, where trips driven by different activity purposes are mixed into purpose-agnostic interaction patterns. Although static urban attributes such as POIs and land use can enrich region-level semantics, they do not explicitly ground mobility interactions in activity-purpose signals. As a result, downstream adaptation is often performed over entangled embeddings, making it difficult to select task-relevant functional semantics. To address these limitations, we propose EASTAR, an event-anchored and task-adaptive framework for urban region representation learning. EASTAR treats offline activity events as sparse semantic anchors and uses them to factorize aggregated mobility representations into multiple purpose-related semantic channels. It further introduces free channels to capture latent mobility patterns not covered by event data and a global channel to preserve overall spatial structure. To adapt the learned channel space to different downstream objectives, EASTAR designs a task-adaptive prompt router that initializes task-channel relevance from LLM-derived priors and refines the routing weights through downstream supervision. Experiments on two real-world urban datasets across four prediction tasks show that EASTAR consistently outperforms representative baselines, achieving up to 39.15% reduction in MAE. Ablation and interpretability analyses further demonstrate the effectiveness of event anchoring, semantic channel construction, and task-adaptive routing.