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...
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.
The paper introduces OVRSISBench, a unified benchmark for open‑vocabulary remote sensing image segmentation, and evaluates existing OVS/OVRSIS models, uncovering their shortcomings in remote sensing contexts. Leveraging insights from this evaluation, the authors propose RSKT‑Seg, a new framework featuring a Multi‑Directional Cost Map Aggregation module, an Efficient Cost Map Fusion transformer, and a Remote Sensing Knowledge Transfer module. Experiments on the benchmark demonstrate that RSKT‑Seg outperforms strong baselines by +3.8 mIoU and +5.9 mACC while achieving twice the inference speed.
By Bingyu Li, Haocheng Dong, Da Zhang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Junyu Gao, Xuelong Li
arXiv:2610.33551v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: High-resolution remote sensing (RS) imagery provides fine spatial detail over large areas, making it essential for fine-grained scene understanding. Re...
By Yuxi Li, Lu Si, Xia Liao, Yidong Shen, Zheng Wei, Jun Zhang, Xin Yuan
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.
By Xiaoyu Tang, Jun Dong, Jintao Cheng, Rui Fan
The paper introduces NWPU-Refer, the largest bilingual dataset for referring remote sensing image segmentation, featuring 15,003 high‑resolution images from over 30 countries and 49,745 annotated targets. It also proposes the Multi‑scale Referring Segmentation Network (MRSNet), which uses an Intra‑scale Feature Interaction Module to refine fine‑grained features and a Hierarchical Feature Interaction Module to fuse cross‑scale information while preserving spatial structure. Experiments on NWPU‑Refer and RRSIS‑D show that MRSNet achieves strong, competitive performance, especially under strict IoU thresholds, demonstrating the effectiveness of both the new dataset and the model.
By Zhigang Yang, Huiguang Yao, Linmao Tian, Xuezhi Zhao, Qiang Li, Qi Wang
arXiv:2603. 11804v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) adapted to remote sensing rely heavily on domain-specific image-text supervision, yet high-quality annotations for satellite and aerial imagery remain scarce and expensive to produce.
By Stefan Maria Ailuro (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Mario Markov (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Mohammad Mahdi (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Delyan Boychev (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Luc Van Gool (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"), Danda Pani Paudel (INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski")
The paper introduces MGRL-RSCC, a multi‑granularity reward reinforcement learning framework for Remote Sensing Change Captioning (RSCC). It uses a CNN with hierarchical self‑attention to extract visual features, a Transformer decoder for visual‑to‑linguistic translation, and a dual‑decoding strategy combined with token‑level supervised learning and self‑critical reinforcement learning. Three reward functions—linguistic fluency, change state consistency, and structural‑semantic relevance—are employed to improve caption quality and reduce exposure bias and conservative generation.
By Futian Wang, Mengqi Wang, Xiao Wang, Wentao Wu, Haowen Wang, Zhicheng Zhao, Jin Tang
arXiv:2606. 10819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: RS-MLLMs enable natural-language understanding and spatial reasoning over earth observation imagery.
By Miaoxin Cai, Guanqun Wang, Wei Zhang, Guangyao Zhou, Yin Zhuang, Tong Zhang, Hao Wang, He Chen, Jun Li
arXiv:2609.24510v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent advances in vision foundation models (VFMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse unimodal visual tasks. However, adapting VFMs...
By Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li, Yuting Yang, Long Sun, Wenping Ma, Xu Liu, Fang Liu
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
arXiv:2608. 18339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities yet remain sensitive to real-world distribution shifts during inference.
By Qi Yu, Zhichen Zeng, Katherine Tieu, Xiyuan Yang, Ruizhong Qiu, Yuchen Yan, Lihui Liu, Yanjun Zhao, Lingjie Chen, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong