Beyond RGB: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs for Hyperspectral Image Understanding via Training-Free Reasoning Framework

Multi-spectral imagery is a valuable input signal for Remote Sensing applications, such as land-use and land-cover classification and environmental monitoring. However, generalist Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) are typically trained on RGB images, limiting their applicability to the RGB domain. At the same time, training multi-spectral multi-modal models is expensive and produces uniquely specialized models. To address this, we propose a novel training-free approach that introduces multi-spectral data within the inference pipeline of standard RGB-only LMMs, allowing large gains in performance. Our approach leverages the LMMs' understanding of the visual space by adapting non-RGB inputs to that space and injecting domain-specific information and Chain-of-Thought reasoning as instructions. We demonstrate this with the Gemini 2.5 model and observe strong Zero-Shot performance gains on popular Remote Sensing benchmarks. These results highlight the potential for geospatial professionals to leverage powerful generalist models for specialized sensor inputs, benefiting from rich reasoning capabilities grounded in specialized data.

Hyperspectral remote sensing has advanced across diverse deep learning paradigms, including spectral spatial CNNs, Vision Transformers, Mamba, graph neural networks, Kolmogorov Arnold networks, and self supervised masked autoencoding. Yet progress remains hindered by fragmented repositories, incompatible tensor conventions, and non standardized evaluation. Hyperspectral Image Models addresses these challenges through a modular framework unifying 55 representative models across six paradigms with a common registry, automatic 4D/5D tensor adaptation, and standardized constructors. It integrates 24 benchmark scenes from Airborne, Spaceborne, UAV, and Mars CRISM sensors, with caching, label remapping, PCA, explicit band selection or raw spectra, optional spatial max pooling, and arbitrary PxP patch extraction. To prevent inflated accuracy from overlapping windows, it supports class balanced random partitioning and spatially disjoint regional blocking with Chebyshev guard bands that eliminate train test pixel overlap. Experiments use a single config with deterministic seeds and complete provenance, generating LaTeX benchmark tables and classification maps. Across 1,320 model scene evaluations and 6,600 seeded runs, scene difficulty dominates architecture, with mean accuracy ranging from 96.40% on Botswana to 56.70% on Houston 2018, versus a 15 point spread across paradigm means. No paradigm universally dominates, while sub 1 M parameter models can match architectures two orders of magnitude larger. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Tanishq251/Hyperspectral-Image-Models.

Spectra are a prevalent yet highly information-dense form of scientific imagery, presenting substantial challenges to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to their unstructured and domain-specific characteristics. Here we introduce SpecVQA, a professional scientific-image benchmark for evaluating multimodal models on scientific spectral understanding, covering 7 representative spectrum types with expert-annotated question-answer pairs. The aim comprises two aspects: spectra scientific QA evaluation and corresponding underlying task evaluation. SpecVQA contains 620 figures and 3100 QA pairs curated from peer-reviewed literature, targeting both direct information extraction and domain-specific reasoning. To effectively reduce token length while preserving essential curve characteristics, we propose a spectral data sampling and interpolation reconstruction approach. Ablation studies further confirm that the approach achieves substantial performance improvements on the proposed benchmark. We test the capability of prominent MLLMs in scientific spectral understanding on our benchmark and present a leaderboard. This work represents an essential step toward enhancing spectral understanding in multimodal large models and suggests promising directions for extending visual-language models to broader scientific research and data analysis.