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.
arXiv:2609.37481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale pervasive sensing increasingly relies on high-resolution satellite imagery, yet task-specific onboard vision is constrained by costly annot...
arXiv:2606. 02092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery requires models that capture both global context and local detail under tight computational budgets.
OptiSAR-Net++ introduces a new cross‑domain remote sensing visual grounding task (CD‑RSVG) and the first large‑scale benchmark dataset, OptSAR‑RSVG. The framework replaces Transformer decoding with a CLIP‑based contrastive approach, employing a patch‑level Low‑Rank Adaptation Mixture of Experts for efficient cross‑domain feature decoupling and a text‑guided dual‑gate fusion module for improved semantic‑visual alignment. Experiments show state‑of‑the‑art performance on OptSAR‑RSVG and DIOR‑RSVG, with notable gains in localization accuracy and computational efficiency.
arXiv:2608. 15647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic segmentation of very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery increasingly benefits from strong pretrained hierarchical encoders, yet exploiting their multi-stage representations remains difficult.
Semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery requires models that capture both global context and local detail under tight computational budgets. Prior work typically optimizes for one of these axes: attention for global context, convolution for local detail, or compactness for efficiency.
arXiv:2607.01630v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dynamic expansion methods for class-incremental learning (CIL) protect task-specific knowledge by growing dedicated tokens or subnetworks, yet our...
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:2603. 12478v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal instruction tuning is often compute-inefficient because training budgets are spread across large mixed image-video pools whose utility is highly uneven.
arXiv:2608. 06612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The plethora of readily available geospatial data offers exciting opportunities to learn high quality representations of the planet, but the sheer size of the Earth Observations (EO), differing modalities, and different sensor types pose significant challenges in doing so.
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.
The paper introduces Gated Token Recurrence (GTR), a softmax‑free recurrent vision backbone that replaces global softmax attention with gated linear attention, alternating scan directions, and enhanced SwiGLU blocks. GTR is distilled from a DINOv3 teacher using only final‑layer patch‑token alignment, and achieves strong performance on COCO object detection (58.9 box AP) with very low latency (1.908 ms on an RTX 4090). The backbone also transfers to multiple dense prediction tasks and runs efficiently on edge hardware via a specialized CUDA operator and TensorRT deployment.
The paper demonstrates a lightweight method to adapt general-purpose vision‑language models (VLMs) for multispectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image understanding. By rendering each observation as five optical views and one SAR view, naming them in the prompt, and applying LoRA to the language network and selected visual transformer blocks, the authors enable VLMs to process band composites, spectral indices, and radar backscatter without retraining a new foundation model. On a balanced six‑class land‑cover benchmark from BigEarthNet‑v2, the adapted Qwen3‑VL achieves a micro F1 score of 0.8275, and the same protocol improves four other VLMs and transfers to flood verification and captioning tasks.