Neural Embedding Compression for Efficient Multi-Task Earth Observation Modelling

As repositories of large scale data in earth observation (EO) have grown, so have transfer and storage costs for model training and inference, expending significant resources. We introduce Neural Embedding Compression (NEC), based on the transfer of compressed embeddings to data consumers instead of raw EO data. We adapt foundation models (FM) through learned neural compression to generate multi-task embeddings while navigating the tradeoff between compression rate and embedding utility. We update only a small fraction of the FM parameters ( 10%) for a short training period (∼1% of the iterations of∼pre-training). We evaluate NEC on two EO tasks: scene classification and semantic segmentation. Compared with applying traditional compression to the raw data, NEC achieves similar accuracy with a 75% to 90% reduction in data. Even at 99.7% compression, performance drops by only 5% on the scene classification task. Overall, NEC is a data-efficient yet performant approach for multi-task EO modelling.