SPECTRA is a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework for geospatial foundation models that tackles two key challenges: spectral mismatch and high adaptation cost. It introduces Band‑Routed Embedding (BRE) to map downstream sensor bands into the pretrained model’s expected band space, enabling full use of available spectral data without altering the patch embedding interface. Additionally, Stage‑wise Transferability‑aware LoRA (ST‑LoRA) estimates stage‑wise transferability and assigns LoRA ranks accordingly, concentrating trainable parameters on the most transferable stages and reducing overall adaptation cost.
By Xingyan Li, Jordan A. Caraballo-Vega, Jie Gong, Mark L. Carroll, Jianwu Wang
Cryo-Bench is a new benchmark that evaluates foundation models for cryosphere mapping, comprising six semantic‑segmentation datasets across five cryospheric components (supraglacial debris, glacial lakes, sea ice, calving fronts, and Antarctic ice‑shelf extent). The benchmark includes multispectral, RGB, and SAR observations from under‑represented regions and tests thirteen geo‑foundation models alongside U‑Net and Vision Transformer baselines. Results show that with frozen encoders U‑Net slightly outperforms TerraMind, but the difference is not statistically significant; fine‑tuning with learning‑rate optimization can dramatically improve performance for some models, while in few‑shot scenarios several foundation models retain over 90 % of their full‑label accuracy.
By Saurabh Kaushik, Lalit Maurya, Beth Tellman, Swalpa Kumar Roy, Valerio Marsocci, Gustau Camps-Valls, Jocelyn Chanussot
arXiv:2606. 13896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize.
By Julia Romero, Qin Lv, Morteza Karimzadeh
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:2608.24516v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Satellite-based distributed learning promises to train machine-learning models directly in orbit using massive, globally dispersed sensor data, there...
By Hao Wu, Kin Whye Chew, Yizhan Han, Han Li, Jingxian Wang
Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification systems are increasingly deployed on platforms with strict computational budgets, such as UAVs and small spaceborne sensors. In these settings, accuracy alone is not enough; the model must also run within tight latency and memory constraints.
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.
By Atiq Ur Rehman, Joseph Michael Donovan
The paper investigates how stable band‑selection methods are and how that stability relates to semantic segmentation performance on the Hyperspectral City V2 dataset. Six band‑selection techniques were tested on ten different class‑balanced ROI sets, producing 60 top‑25 band subsets. Results show that Sim‑LP has the highest intra‑method stability, and together with JMIM+CSNR it also delivers the best segmentation results, achieving up to 2.01 mIoU improvement and 18–22× faster CPU inference for a 9‑band subset, though stability does not consistently predict segmentation quality.
By Jiarong Li, Imad Ali Shah, Enda Ward, Martin Glavin, Edward Jones, Brian Deegan
arXiv:2607. 14127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Representative clutter height (RCH) is a key parameter in radio propagation and interference analysis because it captures the dominant height of local obstructions that drive terminal clutter loss.
By Shohini Sarkar, Smithi Mahendran, Rishi Chudasama, Varun Mannam, Arav Luthra, Yuvraj Rekhi, Vivek Nadig, Arsh Goenka
arXiv:2607. 07758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) have transformed machine learning from isolated task-specific model development toward general-purpose models pretrained on broad data and adapted to multiple downstream tasks.
By Syed Usama Imtiaz, Mitra Nasr Azadani, Nasrin Alamdari
arXiv:2609.14735v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Deep Learning (DL)-based channel estimation has shown high accuracy and low latency in terrestrial 5G NR, but Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Non-Terrestrial N...
By Miguel Camelo Botero, Nina Slamnik-Krije\v{s}torac, Johann Marquez-Barja
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