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
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
arXiv:2609.37481v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large-scale pervasive sensing increasingly relies on high-resolution satellite imagery, yet task-specific onboard vision is constrained by costly annot...
By Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy, Marius Bernahrndt, Tobias Hecking
The paper introduces SparK-SAR, a sparse convolutional masked pretraining framework that leverages ConvNeXt for high‑resolution Sentinel‑1 GRD SAR data. It presents three key contributions: a domain‑adapted ConvNeXt‑RS encoder with a reduced stem stride, a lightweight ConvNeXt‑512 decoder that cuts VRAM usage while matching UNet accuracy, and an analysis of FP16 instability and layer‑wise learning‑rate decay benefits. Experiments on four Copernicus‑Bench S1GRD tasks show that the 27.8 M‑parameter ConvNeXt‑RS encoder outperforms a larger ViT baseline on most tasks and demonstrates strong data efficiency, with classification saturating at 10–25 % of the SSL4EO‑S12 corpus.
By Yuki Natsume, Sang-Ho Yun, Chai Kiat Yeo
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. 23024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-resolution satellite imagery is the backbone of good land-cover classification, and without that, environmental monitoring, urban planning, and sustainable resource management all fall short.
By Atiq Ur Rehman, Joseph Michael Donovan