arXiv Machine Learning

Foundation Models Meet Agriculture: Challenges Beyond Pretraining

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AgroBench: A Reproducible Multimodal Benchmark for Weakly Supervised Crop Yield Learning from County Statistics and Pixel Observations

AgroBench is a reproducible benchmark that converts U.S. county-level crop yield statistics into weakly supervised pixel‑level crop time series. The data generation pipeline fuses USDA yield data with land cover masks, Sentinel‑2 and Sentinel‑1 imagery, climatic variables, and terrain information to produce multimodal sequences for individual crop pixels across the growing season. The benchmark includes over 13 million observations from 788,654 crop pixels, covering 5,107 county‑year combinations for five major U.S. crops from 2017 to 2024, and establishes a Leave‑One‑Year‑Out evaluation protocol with baseline machine learning results.

By Udaiveer Singh, Rajiv Ranjan, Shashank Tamaskar, Dharmendra Saraswat
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Foundation-Model Earth Representations Enable Regional-Scale Forest Aboveground Biomass Monitoring Across the Northeastern United States

arXiv:2607. 27217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is a critical indicator of ecosystem productivity and terrestrial carbon storage, yet regional carbon monitoring remains constrained by the sparse spatial and temporal availability of field inventories and airborne structural measurements.

By Shashika Lamahewage, Chandi Witharana
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

Multi-Modal, Multi-Temporal Geospatial Foundation Models Improve Global Above-Ground Biomass Estimation

The study evaluates 13 Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) for estimating above‑ground biomass (AGB) from satellite imagery, comparing them to a fully supervised state‑of‑the‑art baseline trained on the AGBD dataset. Most GFMs perform worse than the baseline, but TESSERA and AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) features combined with specific prediction heads achieve superior results, with the best model attaining an RMSE of 50.79 Mg/ha. This AEF‑based model also generalizes better to unseen regions, reduces RMSE by up to 25% in excluded areas, and matches the ESA CCI biomass product when trained on limited regional labels.

By Ghjulia Sialelli, Linus Scheibenreif, Jan Dirk Wegner, Konrad Schindler
arXiv AI
Jun 2

CAFOSat: A Strongly Annotated Dataset for Infrastructure-Aware CAFO Mapping Using High-Resolution Imagery

arXiv:2606. 00548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) play an important role in agricultural production but are also associated with environmental, public health, and disease surveillance concerns.

By Oishee Bintey Hoque, Nibir Chandra Mandal, Mandy L Wilson, Samarth Swarup, Madhav Marathe, Abhijin Adiga
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Geospatial Foundation Models to Enable Progress on Sustainable Development Goals

arXiv:2505. 24528v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation Models (FMs) are large-scale, pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI) systems that have revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision, and are now advancing geospatial analysis and Earth Observation (EO).

By Pedram Ghamisi, Weikang Yu, Xiaokang Zhang, Aldino Rizaldy, Jian Wang, Chufeng Zhou, Richard Gloaguen, Gustau Camps-Valls
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 29

Benchmarking Geospatial Foundation Models for Agriculture Applications

Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite imagery promise broad generalization across remote sensing tasks and regions, but their geographic transferability has not been systematically tested, especially in agriculture applications. This paper presents a controlled benchmark that evaluates three models, Prithvi, SpectralGPT, and SatMAE, on multi-temporal crop segmentation and change detection across four U.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 26

ReLEAP: Upcycling Vision Datasets through Cross-Task Unification and Semi-Supervised Annotation

ReLEAP is a Python framework that unifies heterogeneous image datasets by abstracting data sources, reusing annotations across tasks, and mapping labels to a shared taxonomy. The authors demonstrate its use in precision agriculture, integrating fifteen datasets of plant species and annotation types, and show that unified data and annotation upcycling improve training data availability and transparency. They also conduct cross-dataset experiments to explore how domain-specific and foundation models can generate higher-level annotations in unsupervised, weakly supervised, and semi-supervised settings.

By Julia Simon, Daniel Steininger, Andreas Trondl