TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation
arXiv:2504. 11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO).
SIMPLER is a pre‑fine‑tuning method that reduces inference and deployment costs for Earth Observation foundation models by pruning redundant layers. It uses layer‑wise representation similarity on unlabeled task data to identify and remove up to 79% of parameters without requiring gradients, magnitude heuristics, or hyperparameter tuning. Experiments on Prithvi‑EO‑2, TerraMind, and ImageNet‑pretrained ViT‑MAE show that SIMPLER retains 94% of baseline performance while achieving 2.1× faster training and 2.6× faster inference.
arXiv:2504. 11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO).
Hyperspectral remote sensing has advanced across diverse deep learning paradigms, including spectral spatial CNNs, Vision Transformers, Mamba, graph neural networks, Kolmogorov Arnold networks, and se...
The paper introduces a composition‑aware pretraining framework for geospatial foundation models that explicitly encodes fractional land‑cover mixtures as histogram targets for each satellite image cell. By using Earth Mover’s Distance to distill these composition targets into a 36.8 M‑parameter backbone, the authors demonstrate significant improvements on region‑level tasks such as zero‑shot image retrieval and scene classification, while maintaining competitive performance on fine‑grained tasks like segmentation and object detection. The method outperforms larger models (SatMAE and Prithvi‑EO‑2.0) and achieves a 55.6 % relative boost on the ForestNet‑12 dataset, evidencing the benefit of explicit composition modeling.
The technical report introduces Hyperspectral Image Models, a modular framework that unifies 55 deep‑learning models across six paradigms for hyperspectral remote sensing. It standardizes tensor conventions, evaluation protocols, and dataset handling, integrating 24 benchmark scenes from various sensors and providing tools to avoid train‑test overlap. Experiments across 1,320 model‑scene combinations show that scene difficulty outweighs architecture, with no single paradigm dominating and small models achieving performance comparable to much larger ones.
The paper introduces a PyTorch library that unifies 55 hyperspectral image models across six deep‑learning paradigms, providing a common registry, automatic tensor adaptation, and standardized constructors. It includes 24 benchmark scenes from various sensors, with tools for data preprocessing, patch extraction, and rigorous train‑test partitioning to avoid overlap. Experiments on 1,320 model‑scene combinations show that scene difficulty outweighs architecture choice, with no single paradigm dominating and small models performing competitively with much larger ones.
HyperVision introduces the first ground‑based hyperspectral pre‑trained backbone, addressing challenges of varying spectral configurations, limited annotations, and dataset diversity. It employs a channel‑adaptive dynamic embedding to unify heterogeneous inputs, a multi‑source pseudo‑labeling strategy combining SAM2 spatial cues with HyperFree spectral details, and cross‑modal knowledge distillation from a pre‑trained RGB vision model. Trained on 15k images from 26 datasets, HyperVision achieves significant improvements—up to 16.3% relative gain in hyperspectral semantic segmentation, 2.1% in object tracking AUC, and 35.5% reduction in salient object detection MAE—while requiring only head‑only adaptation.
Hyperspectral remote sensing has advanced across diverse deep learning paradigms, including spectral spatial CNNs, Vision Transformers, Mamba, graph neural networks, Kolmogorov Arnold networks, and se...
Large 3D foundation models such as MASt3R achieve state-of-the-art stereo reconstruction but are computationally demanding for deployment under strict hardware constraints -- a critical limitation in domains such as planetary exploration, where onboard computing is severely restricted. We study how far such models can be compressed through knowledge distillation, using lunar stereo reconstruction as a challenging and practically relevant case study.
The paper introduces SparK-SAR, a sparse convolutional masked pretraining framework that leverages ConvNeXt for high‑resolution Sentinel‑1 GRD SAR data. It presents three key contributions: a domain‑adapted ConvNeXt‑RS encoder with a reduced stem stride, a lightweight ConvNeXt‑512 decoder that cuts VRAM usage while matching UNet accuracy, and an analysis of FP16 instability and layer‑wise learning‑rate decay benefits. Experiments on four Copernicus‑Bench S1GRD tasks show that the 27.8 M‑parameter ConvNeXt‑RS encoder outperforms a larger ViT baseline on most tasks and demonstrates strong data efficiency, with classification saturating at 10–25 % of the SSL4EO‑S12 corpus.
The paper introduces a multimodal foundation model for lunar remote sensing, trained from scratch on SomBench—a dataset of nearly two million co‑registered tile bundles across 11 modalities at 1 m and 100 m resolutions. The model extends the TerraMind masked‑token architecture with lunar‑specific features such as explicit acquisition geometry and joint training of two spatial scales, and employs FlexiViT patch embeddings for adaptable patch sizes. Evaluation on crater detection, irregular mare patch segmentation, and polar ice prospectivity regression shows that the pretrained model matches or surpasses ImageNet‑pretrained baselines, with notable label efficiency and effective adaptation via LoRA.
arXiv:2607. 23024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-resolution satellite imagery is the backbone of good land-cover classification, and without that, environmental monitoring, urban planning, and sustainable resource management all fall short.
Zebra3D introduces a layerwise sparse‑linear hybrid attention framework that enhances the efficiency of pretrained 3D foundation models without requiring training from scratch. By assigning linear‑centered attention to tolerant early stages and tile‑sparse attention to sensitive middle‑to‑late stages, it preserves context through landmark summaries and enables training‑free conversion via closed‑form affine fitting. Across multiple backbones, Zebra3D achieves strong reconstruction and camera‑pose accuracy with high attention sparsity, delivering up to 7.1× speedups at 1,024 views and maintaining performance close to dense counterparts after optional post‑conversion training.