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.
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?
arXiv:2606. 12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis, and AI agents that automate geospatial workflows remain unvalidated: no benchmark evaluates agents operating through structured tool calling against real APIs.
arXiv:2609.09482v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Critical infrastructure location data is often incomplete and unevenly distributed globally, especially in developing regions. Earth observation founda...
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).
The Planetary Prediction Engine (PPE) is an autonomous AI system that transforms natural-language queries into end-to-end geospatial predictions. It automatically retrieves and fuses multimodal datasets from open-web and Earth observation sources, incorporates foundation model embeddings, and searches task‑specific model families with overfitting safeguards. Across multiple domains, PPE outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines, improving regression metrics for CDC health indicators, FEMA risk indices, and the Social Vulnerability Index, doubling accuracy for Nigerian food security indicators, and achieving higher recall in Ebola outbreak nowcasting.
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.
arXiv:2606. 13148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate and environmental decision-making increasingly requires reasoning across heterogeneous inputs, including gridded physical data, satellite imagery, geospatial context, and simulator outputs.
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...
arXiv:2607. 15781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geospatial datasets support applications from urban planning to climate modeling, yet consistent assessment of FAIR compliance is difficult.
arXiv:2605. 24844v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) applied to Geology often hallucinate when reasoning about subsurface structures and deep-time evolution, current AI in Earth sciences predominantly targets surface remote sensing and GIS.
arXiv:2608.24665v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Power outage prediction models are increasingly used in assessments of climate-driven infrastructure risk, yet current evaluation practices obscure whe...
Geographic Information System (GIS) professionals rely on multi-step spatial analysis workflows to support decision-making in urban planning, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. The process is tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone.