Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing imagery provides rich spatial details but poses challenges for accurate and efficient multimodal understanding. Existing evidence acquisition methods selectively explore relevant image regions, yet largely rely on generative multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for intermediate search control. However, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) primarily aligns these models with human-preferred responses rather than explicitly optimizing region-level relevance judgments, while repeated autoregressive decoding introduces additional computational overhead. To address these limitations, we propose GeoJeV, a training-free method that formulates evidence acquisition as spatial probability-driven decision making. At each evaluated region, a frozen JeV model produces a probability distribution over candidate regions. Specifically, Region Rank prioritizes candidate regions, Sparse Branch adaptively determines branching width through sparse probability support, and Depth Gate controls refinement depth based on branch sparsity and distribution concentration. By coordinating search priority, branching width, and refinement depth through a shared distribution, GeoJeV reduces reliance on RLHF-aligned generation and eliminates intermediate decoding. Experiments on LRS-GRO, MME-RealWorld-RS, and LRS-VQA achieve accuracies of 60.59%, 52.79%, and 34.32%, respectively. Across the three benchmarks, GeoJeV improves the average accuracy of Qwen3-VL-8B by +5.32pp with only 1.12 additional seconds per question, while achieving a 7.8-fold inference speedup over the recent method.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Motivation and performance of GeoJeV. (Top) Overall pipeline of evidence acquisition. GeoJeV uses a shared spatial probability distribution to jointly control search priority, branching width, and refinement depth. (Bottom) Average accuracy on MME-RealWorld-RS. GeoJeV with Qwen3-VL-8B achieves the highest accuracy among the plotted methods, exceeding WeaveEarth by +5.58pp .
Fig. 2 : Overview of GeoJeV. (Left) JeV estimates a spatial probability distribution over candidate regions. (Middle) Region Rank sets search priority, Sparse Branch adapts branching width, and Depth Gate controls refinement depth through early stopping. (Right) The acquired regions are consolidated and assembled into a spatial evidence canvas for final answering.
Fig. 3 : Overview of the three benchmarks. Headings report image counts and average resolutions, while bars show question counts and percentages.
Method
LRS-GRO (%) ↑
MME-RealWorld-RS (%) ↑
Global
Region
Object
Avg.
Color
Count
Position
Avg.
Commercial MLLMs
GPT-4o [ 50 ]
31.10
12.37
21.86
21.78
34.18
15.17
37.07
28.81
Gemini-2.5-Flash [ 51 ]
57.95
23.39
30.76
37.37
55.86
33.28
51.63
46.92
General-purpose MLLMs
Qwen2.5-VL-7B [ 52 ]
69.39
38.47
43.58
50.48
45.94
21.05
55.23
40.74
TABLE I : Category-wise accuracy comparison on LRS-GRO and MME-RealWorld-RS.
Method
LRS-GRO
MME-RealWorld-RS
LRS-VQA
Avg.
Acc. (%) ↑
Lat. (s/Q) ↓
Acc. (%) ↑
Lat. (s/Q) ↓
Acc. (%) ↑
Lat. (s/Q) ↓
Acc. (%) ↑
Lat. (s/Q) ↓
Direct
57.68
7.97
41.94
14.70
32.11
8.74
43.91
10.47
ZoomSearch
55.32
69.62
38.17
122.08
32.62
78.49
42.04
90.06
WeaveEarth
59.86
8.06
47.21
13.27
31.02
8.95
46.03
10.09
GeoJeV
60.59
8.52
52.79
15.88
34.32
10.37
49.23
11.59
TABLE III : Accuracy–latency comparison across three benchmarks with Qwen3-VL-8B as the shared frozen answering backbone.
Method
LRS-GRO
MME-RS
LRS-VQA
Avg.
Qwen3-VL-8B
Direct
57.68
41.94
32.11
43.91
GeoJeV
60.59
52.79
34.32
49.23
Gain
+2.91pp
+10.85pp
+2.21pp
+5.32pp
LLaVA-OV-7B
Direct
46.18
26.84
26.07
33.03
TABLE IV : Accuracy gains of GeoJeV across two frozen answering backbones.
Fig. 4 : Accuracy–latency trade-off with Qwen3-VL-8B. Each point shows mean accuracy and end-to-end latency across three benchmarks.
Fig. 5 : Qualitative example of GeoJeV inference, showing spatial probability-driven evidence acquisition, spatial evidence canvas construction, and final answering by a frozen MLLM.
Variant
Components
MME-RealWorld-RS (%) ↑
Inference Cost
Region Rank
Sparse Branch
Depth Gate
Color
Count
Position
Avg.
Fwd./Q ↓
Lat. (s/Q) ↓
Direct
–
–
–
48.07
21.35
56.41
41.94
0.00
14.70
+ Region Rank
✓
–
–
67.17
28.06
60.06
51.76
3.00
17.17
+ Sparse Branch
✓
✓
–
66.53
28.14
60.86
51.84
2.60
16.31
GeoJeV (Full)
✓
✓
✓
69.80
29.93
58.63
52.79
2.38
15.88
TABLE V : Component ablations of GeoJeV on MME-RealWorld-RS with Qwen3-VL-8B as the frozen answering backbone.
College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130021, China · Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Changchun 130021, China · Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100000, China +1