Geo-foundation models (GFMs) are typically evaluated by downstream task predictive performance, revealing little about which physical features they are sensitive to or use in prediction. This limits d...
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
The paper introduces FOLIAGE, a geometry‑centered latent world model designed for systems that grow and change shape over time. FOLIAGE allocates higher‑resolution state to regions expected to grow while keeping mature areas compact, fusing RGB, point‑cloud, and mesh data into a deployable geometric state and conditioning dynamics on material controls. The authors evaluate the model on new benchmarks (SURF‑GARDEN and SURF‑BENCH) and demonstrate significant reductions in inverse‑material error, mesh forecasting error, and improved cross‑modal retrieval, with robust performance under sensor loss and correspondence corruption.
By Xiaoyi Liu, Hao Tang
arXiv:2607. 05207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) is designed to learn generic, transferable representations rather than representations optimized for a single task.
By Rohita Mocharla, Vishal M. Patel
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: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