The paper "No One Knows the State of the Art in Geospatial Foundation Models" critiques the current lack of standardization in geospatial foundation model (GFM) research, highlighting inconsistencies in evaluation, training, and model release practices across 152 papers. It reports significant discrepancies—46 cross-paper disagreements of at least 10 points for the same model and benchmark, 94 out of 126 papers using unique pretraining configurations, and 39% of papers releasing no model weights. The authors propose six concrete expectations, including named-license weight release, shared core evaluations, and a unified evaluation harness, to address these coordination failures and foster a clearer, comparable understanding of GFM progress.
By Isaac Corley, Nils Lehmann, Caleb Robinson, Gabriel Tseng, Anthony Fuller, Hamed Alemohammad, Evan Shelhamer, Jennifer Marcus, Hannah Kerner
arXiv:2607. 18504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarks for Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) increasingly rank models by aggregate score, but such rankings obscure why models differ: how much of the gap is architecture, how much is decoder capacity, and how much is a use-case-specific artefact?
By Frederick Schindlegger, Kenzo Bounegta, Eva Gmelich Meijling, Johannes Jakubik, Arnt-B{\o}rre Salberg, Theodor Forgaard, Nicolas Longepe, Valerio Marsocci
arXiv:2608. 00012v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to interpret Earth observation data, yet their capability to support real-world disaster emergency response remains insufficiently evaluated.
By Fengxiang Wang, Qiuyang Yu, Yueying Li, Mingshuo Chen, Chengchi Fei, Kaiyi Xu, Lixin Gu, Wangxu Wei, Junchao Gong, Lipeng Ma, Jiong Wang, Fenghua Ling, Wenlong Zhang, Xue Yang, Wenjing Yang, Ben Fei, Long Lan
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:2604. 20822v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The offshore wind energy sector is expanding rapidly, increasing the need for independent, high-temporal-resolution monitoring of infrastructure deployment and operation at global scale.
By Thorsten Hoeser, Felix Bachofer, Claudia Kuenzer
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. 17403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid assessment of building damage from satellite imagery is essential for effective disaster response and recovery.
By Shikha V. Chandel, Yadav Raj Ghimire, Timothy Agboada, Leila Hashemi-Beni
The study presents a method for estimating building heights in a large Brazilian city using freely available satellite data, including TerraSAR-X StripMap, PlanetScope, and Sentinel-1. A geographically weighted random forest model achieved an RMSE of 5.34 m and an R² of 0.756 against LiDAR reference data, with local feature importance varying by building type and context. The results highlight that no single sensor dominates across all scenarios, offering guidance for selecting satellite-derived products in different urban settings.
By Guilherme Iablonovski, Pierre-Louis Frison, Tatiana Silva da Silva
arXiv:2608. 04706v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monitoring of offshore wind energy infrastructure life cycles, especially during the deployment phase, is an important contribution for stakeholders to make informed decisions in a phase of increasing deployment activities.
By Thorsten Hoeser, Felix Bachofer, Claudia Kuenzer
arXiv:2601.18493v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision--language models (VLMs) show promise for disaster-response remote sensing, but existing benchmarks mainly emphasize scene-level or damage-ce...
By Sara Tehrani, Yonghao Xu, Leif Haglund, Amanda Berg, Gulnaz Zhambulova, Michael Felsberg
The paper presents 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 of 0.8275, and the same protocol improves four other VLMs and transfers to flood verification and captioning tasks.
"whyItMatters":"The study shows that existing VLMs can be repurposed for multispectral and SAR tasks through simple input rendering and compact LoRA adaptation, avoiding the need for dedicated encoders and domain pretraining."
By Shanji Liu, Kelu Yao, Junxiao Xue, Chenghui Lv, Xiangyang Miao, Yekai Huang, Yaying Chen, Chao Li
arXiv:2608.30392v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Global food security and sustainable climate action increasingly rely on robust, scalable agricultural monitoring. Earth observation foundation models...
By Vishal Nedungadi, Xingguo Xiong, Marc Ru{\ss}wurm, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis