No Location Left Behind: Measuring and Improving the Fairness of Implicit Representations for Earth Data

Implicit neural representations (INRs) exhibit growing promise in addressing Earth representation challenges, ranging from emissions monitoring to climate modeling. However, existing methods disproportionately prioritize global average performance, whereas practitioners require fine-grained insights to understand biases and variations in these models. To bridge this gap, we introduce FAIR-Earth: a first-of-its-kind dataset explicitly crafted to challenge and examine inequities in Earth representations. FAIR-Earth comprises various high-resolution Earth signals, and uniquely aggregates extensive metadata along stratifications like landmass size and population density to assess the fairness of models. Evaluating state-of-the-art INRs across the various modalities of FAIR-Earth, we uncover striking performance disparities. Certain subgroups, especially those associated with high-frequency signals (e.g., islands, coastlines), are consistently poorly modeled by existing methods. In response, we propose spherical wavelet encodings, building on previous spatial encoding research for INRs. Leveraging the multi-resolution analysis capabilities of wavelets, our encodings yield more consistent performance over various scales and locations, offering more accurate and robust representations of the biased subgroups. These open-source contributions represent a crucial step towards facilitating the equitable assessment and deployment of implicit Earth representations.