The paper introduces a multimodal foundation model for lunar remote sensing, trained from scratch on SomBench—a dataset of nearly two million co‑registered tile bundles across 11 modalities at 1 m and 100 m resolutions. The model extends the TerraMind masked‑token architecture with lunar‑specific features such as explicit acquisition geometry and joint training of two spatial scales, and employs FlexiViT patch embeddings for adaptable patch sizes. Evaluation on crater detection, irregular mare patch segmentation, and polar ice prospectivity regression shows that the pretrained model matches or surpasses ImageNet‑pretrained baselines, with notable label efficiency and effective adaptation via LoRA.
By Paolo Fraccaro, Gabby Nyirjesy, Daniela Szwarcman, Himanshu Patil, Vishal Gaur, Rohit Lal, Rachel A. Slank, Geoffrey Dawson, Hiyam Debary, Michael K. Barker, Andrew Annex, Vishnu Viswanathan, Zachary Morse, Ethan I. Schaefer, Nikolaos Dionelis, Ankur Kumar, Campbell D. Watson, Manil Maskey, Rebekah I. Dawson-Rigas, Juan Bernab\'e-Moreno, Rahul Ramachandran, Sujit Roy
arXiv:2606. 12595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are rapidly transforming Earth observation by enabling scalable pretraining across diverse unlabeled geospatial modalities.
By Philipe Dias, Waqwoya Abebe, Abhishek Potnis, Aristeidis Tsaris, Dan Lu, Xiao Wang, Dalton Lunga
arXiv:2608. 06612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The plethora of readily available geospatial data offers exciting opportunities to learn high quality representations of the planet, but the sheer size of the Earth Observations (EO), differing modalities, and different sensor types pose significant challenges in doing so.
By Kevin Lane, Zhongying Wang, Esther Rolf, Morteza Karimzadeh
Genesis is a generative engine that produces fully consistent multi‑scale satellite image pyramids by combining a vertical super‑resolution model with a horizontal mask‑based outpainting model. It addresses the lack of existing methods that can synthesize a complete quadtree from sparse seed tiles at arbitrary zoom levels and positions, ensuring coherence across both scale and space. The authors also release dense500, a comprehensive multi‑scale dataset and evaluation suite, to benchmark this new task.
By Subash Khanal, Yangzhi Cui, Daniel Cher, Eric Xing, Brian Wei, Srikumar Sastry, Nathan Jacobs
The paper introduces RSMEB, a unified benchmark for remote‑sensing multimodal retrieval that evaluates both cross‑modal and interleaved retrieval across 21 tasks under a single ranking protocol. It also presents VLM2GeoVec, an instruction‑conditioned single‑encoder model that embeds image, text, bounding‑box, and geo‑coordinate tokens into one sequence and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on region‑caption, referring‑expression, and semantic geo‑aware retrieval while remaining competitive on conventional tasks. The authors provide code, checkpoints, and data on GitHub to facilitate reproducibility.
By Emanuel S\'anchez Aimar, Gulnaz Zhambulova, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Yonghao Xu, Michael Felsberg
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