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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: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.
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: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.
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.