arXiv:2608. 19766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised pretraining on remote sensing imagery typically treats all samples as equally informative, despite large variability in geographic and visual structure.
By Daniele Rege Cambrin, Francesco Rossi, Mattia Varile
arXiv:2606. 12595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are rapidly transforming Earth observation by enabling scalable pretraining across diverse unlabeled geospatial modalities.
By Philipe Dias, Waqwoya Abebe, Abhishek Potnis, Aristeidis Tsaris, Dan Lu, Xiao Wang, Dalton Lunga
Rapid advancements in vision-language models have propelled Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (RRSIS) to the forefront of Earth observation. However, practical deployments suffer severe perf...
The paper introduces VPRef, the first cross‑domain benchmark for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation, containing 46,972 language‑image‑annotation triplets with a three‑tier linguistic hierarchy. It proposes a parameter‑efficient adaptation method based on the Segment Anything Model and Low‑Rank Adaptation, using pseudo‑label self‑training for visual drift and random multi‑granularity prompt mixing for textual drift. Experiments show the approach improves cross‑domain segmentation while altering only 1.08 % of the base model’s parameters, offering a strong baseline for future research.
By Quanwei Liu, Tao Huang, Jiaqi Yang, Wei Xiang
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.
By Shuaishuai Cao, Meng Tang, Shuwei Peng, Xuan Liu, Min Huang, Jie Chen, Jiacheng Niu, Yong Chen, Edore Akpokodje, Hui Lin
The paper introduces RSMEB, a unified benchmark for remote‑sensing multimodal retrieval that evaluates both cross‑modal and interleaved retrieval across 21 tasks under a single ranking protocol. It also presents VLM2GeoVec, an instruction‑conditioned single‑encoder model that embeds image, text, bounding‑box, and geo‑coordinate tokens into one sequence and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on region‑caption, referring‑expression, and semantic geo‑aware retrieval while remaining competitive on conventional tasks. The authors provide code, checkpoints, and data on GitHub to facilitate reproducibility.
By Emanuel S\'anchez Aimar, Gulnaz Zhambulova, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Yonghao Xu, Michael Felsberg
Open-vocabulary remote sensing segmentation has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that enables pixel-level recognition of arbitrary categories specified by natural language, including classes unseen during training. However, geospatial domain shifts caused by heterogeneous regions, spatial resolutions, and acquisition platforms weaken visual-text matching and limit cross-dataset generalization.
arXiv:2605. 00310v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Super-resolution (SR) techniques have made major advances in reconstructing high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs.
By Zhili Li, Kangyang Chai, Zhihao Wang, Xiaowei Jia, Yanhua Li, Gengchen Mai, Sergii Skakun, Dinesh Manocha, Yiqun Xie
arXiv:2601. 22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities.
By Shuqi Ke, Giulia Fanti
The paper introduces MIND, a method that distills specialist geospatial model embeddings into a single generalist coordinate embedding with adjustable spatial granularity, using nested supervision across multiple embedding dimensions. MIND’s design allows downstream predictors to use only leading chunks or apply a Chunked Penalty to downweight finer details without retraining the INR. The authors evaluate MIND on CoordBench, a large INR benchmark of 52 datasets and 78 targets, and report that MIND and its Chunked Penalty variant achieve the highest regression and classification scores, especially under regional holdout, establishing a new state‑of‑the‑art for geographic implicit neural representations.
By Isaac Corley, Arjun Rao, Esther Rolf, Konstantin Klemmer, Evan Shelhamer, Nils Lehmann, Marc Ru{\ss}wurm, Gengchen Mai, Nathan Jacobs, Hannah Kerner
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.
By Aryan Kashyap Naveen, Abhishek Srinivas, Pranav Moothedath, Shrutilipi Bhattacharjee
MEOX is a compact multimodal masked autoencoder designed for Earth Observation that uses a 2.939 million‑parameter encoder and 3.115 million total parameters. It incorporates sensor‑specific adapters, explicit validity signals, and a shared sparse‑expert block to maintain modality‑dependent processing before a learned patch‑wise fusion, followed by fourteen encoder blocks that process a single spatial sequence with four metadata tokens. Pretrained on 1.228 million MMEarth64 samples, MEOX achieves strong performance on GEO‑Bench tasks, surpassing prior CSMoE results, and demonstrates effective sensor‑flexible representation learning with a modest parameter budget.
By Mohanad Albughdadi