Heterogeneous Region Embedding with Prompt Learning

The prevalence of region-based urban data has opened new possibilities for exploring correlations among regions to improve urban planning and smart-city solutions. Region embedding, which plays a critical role in this endeavor, faces significant challenges related to the varying nature of city data and the effectiveness of downstream applications. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, HREP (Heterogeneous Region Embedding with Prompt learning), which addresses both intra-region and inter-region correlations through two key modules: Heterogeneous Region Embedding (HRE) and prompt learning for different downstream tasks. The HRE module constructs a heterogeneous region graph based on three categories of data, capturing inter-region contexts such as human mobility and geographic neighbors, and intraregion contexts such as POI (Point-of-Interest) information. We use relation-aware graph embedding to learn region and relation embeddings of edge types, and introduce selfattention to capture global correlations among regions. Additionally, we develop an attention-based fusion module to integrate shared information among different types of correlations. To enhance the effectiveness of region embedding in downstream tasks, we incorporate prompt learning, specifically prefix-tuning, which guides the learning of downstream tasks and results in better prediction performance. Our experiment results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.