Enhanced Urban Region Profiling with Adversarial Self-Supervised Learning

Urban region profiling is pivotal for smart cities, but mining fine-grained semantics from noisy and incomplete urban data remains challenging. In response, we propose a novel self-supervised graph collaborative filtering model for urban region embedding called EUPAS. Specifically, region heterogeneous graphs containing human mobility data, point of interests (POIs) information, and geographic neighborhood details for each region are fed into the model, which generates region embeddings that preserve intra-region and inter-region dependencies through GCNs and multi-head attention. Meanwhile, we introduce spatial perturbation augmentation to generate positive samples that are semantically similar and spatially close to the anchor, preparing for subsequent contrastive learning. Furthermore, adversarial training is employed to construct an effective pretext task by generating strong positive pairs and mining hard negative pairs for the region embeddings. Finally, we jointly optimize supervised and self-supervised learning to encourage the model to capture the high-level semantics of region embeddings while ignoring the noisy and unimportant details. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art methods.