UrbanMoE: A Sparse Multi-Modal Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Multi-Task Urban Region Profiling

TL;DR

UrbanMoE introduces a novel sparse multi-modal mixture-of-experts framework for multi-task urban region profiling, addressing the lack of multi-task models and benchmarks in urban analytics, and demonstrating superior performance on real-world datasets.

Contribution

We establish a comprehensive benchmark for multi-task urban profiling and propose UrbanMoE, the first sparse multi-modal mixture-of-experts model tailored for this domain.

Findings

UrbanMoE outperforms all baselines on three real-world datasets.

The framework effectively captures multi-faceted urban indicators.

Our benchmark facilitates fair comparison and reproducibility in urban analytics.

Abstract

Urban region profiling, the task of characterizing geographical areas, is crucial for urban planning and resource allocation. However, existing research in this domain faces two significant limitations. First, most methods are confined to single-task prediction, failing to capture the interconnected, multi-faceted nature of urban environments where numerous indicators are deeply correlated. Second, the field lacks a standardized experimental benchmark, which severely impedes fair comparison and reproducible progress. To address these challenges, we first establish a comprehensive benchmark for multi-task urban region profiling, featuring multi-modal features and a diverse set of strong baselines to ensure a fair and rigorous evaluation environment. Concurrently, we propose UrbanMoE, the first sparse multi-modal, multi-expert framework specifically architected to solve the multi-task challenge. Leveraging a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture, it dynamically routes multi-modal features to specialized sub-networks, enabling the simultaneous prediction of diverse urban indicators. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets within our benchmark, where UrbanMoE consistently demonstrates superior performance over all baselines. Further in-depth analysis validates the efficacy and efficiency of our approach, setting a new state-of-the-art and providing the community with a valuable tool for future research in urban analytics