arXiv Machine Learning

Far from the Crowd: Scalable Self-Supervised Learning via Geographic Isolation

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 19

TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation

arXiv:2504. 11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO).

By Johannes Jakubik, Felix Yang, Benedikt Blumenstiel, Erik Scheurer, Rocco Sedona, Stefano Maurogiovanni, Jente Bosmans, Nikolaos Dionelis, Valerio Marsocci, Niklas Kopp, Rahul Ramachandran, Paolo Fraccaro, Thomas Brunschwiler, Gabriele Cavallaro, Juan Bernabe-Moreno, Nicolas Long\'ep\'e
arXiv AI
3d ago

A Composition-Aware Pretraining Framework for Geospatial Foundation Models

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

OSMDA: OpenStreetMap-based Domain Adaptation for Remote Sensing VLMs

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")
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

SIMPLER: Efficient Foundation Model Adaptation via Similarity-Guided Layer Pruning for Earth Observation

SIMPLER is a pre‑fine‑tuning method that reduces inference and deployment costs for Earth Observation foundation models by pruning redundant layers. It uses layer‑wise representation similarity on unlabeled task data to identify and remove up to 79% of parameters without requiring gradients, magnitude heuristics, or hyperparameter tuning. Experiments on Prithvi‑EO‑2, TerraMind, and ImageNet‑pretrained ViT‑MAE show that SIMPLER retains 94% of baseline performance while achieving 2.1× faster training and 2.6× faster inference.

By V\'ictor Barreiro, Johannes Jakubik, Francisco Arg\"uello, Dora B. Heras