# LoCA (Location Contrastive Alignment)

Geospatial location encoders could previously align only to a single frozen image encoder, leaving no shared target when radar and optical sensors are combined. LoCA first jointly trains Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 encoders with a contrastive loss to produce a co-aligned, high-rank target, then freezes both and fits a location encoder and a metadata encoder to it. Across 17 downstream tasks it takes the most task wins and wins 68.8% of all per-task comparisons.

Geospatial location encoders could previously align only to a single frozen image encoder, leaving no shared target when radar and optical sensors are combined. LoCA first jointly trains Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 encoders with a contrastive loss to produce a co-aligned, high-rank target, then freezes both and fits a location encoder and a metadata encoder to it. Across 17 downstream tasks it takes the most task wins and wins 68.8% of all per-task comparisons.