Remote Sensing VQA

VQA: Visual Question Answering

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Overview

Remote sensing VQA asks models to interpret Earth imagery and answer questions about objects, land use, spatial relationships, change over time, and measured quantities, supporting applications such as mapping and disaster monitoring. Common approaches adapt vision-language models through fine-tuning or lightweight adapters, while newer systems use localization, image tiling, retrieval, segmentation, or other tools to gather visual evidence. Benchmarks increasingly test high-resolution scenes, multiple sensors, video, temporal comparisons, and quantitative or spatial reasoning. A central challenge is making answers reliably grounded in the right image evidence: models still struggle with fine detail, numerical reasoning, and long-range or cross-view relations, while tool use and larger inputs can increase inference cost.

Latest papers

CardsList

36 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, down 20% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Benchmarking Answer-Grounding Consistency in Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering

    Oct 9, 2026Ping Guo, Zhiqi Huang, Xinran Li +3Remote Sensing VQAVLM Evaluation

    Graduate School of Information, Production and Systems, Waseda University, Kitakyushu, Japan · School of Artificial Intelligence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China · School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China +1

  2. TerraAgent: Demonstration-Grounded Multi-Agent Reasoning for Long-Context Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering

    Oct 7, 2026Jingwen Huang, Yiming Fang, Hanxiao Wu +2Remote Sensing VQAVisual Question Answering

    Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming, China

  3. RS-OPSD: Reliable Privileged On-Policy-Self-Distillation for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing VQA

    Sep 29, 2026Chengjie Jiang, Yunqi Zhou, Jiafeng Yan +3Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingVisual Question Answering

    Tsinghua University · Zhejiang University · Central University of Finance and Economics +2

  4. ReVA: A Scene-Centric Dataset Beyond Repetition for Remote Sensing Video Question Answering

    Sep 28, 2026Zhen Yao, Likai Wang, Yuming Yang +9Remote Sensing VQAVideo QA

    Lehigh University · University of Southern California · Qualcomm AI Research

  5. USAI-Quant: A Quantitative Reasoning Benchmark for Vision-Language Models in Built Environments

    Sep 26, 2026Dongdong Wang, Qingqi Song, Yuzhou Chen +3VLM ReasoningRemote Sensing Benchmarks

    University of Florida

  6. Exploiting answer-invariant redundancies in satellite imagery for efficient VLM inference on edge

    Sep 24, 2026Ishani Janveja, Davis Zhang, Seoyul Oh +1Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingRemote Sensing VQA

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  7. GeoNLI - A Natural Language Interpreter for Satellite Imagery

    Sep 23, 2026Ashutosh Gandhe, Anupam Rawat, Geet Sethi +5Remote Sensing Visual GroundingRemote Sensing VQA

    Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

  8. The Earth in One Gaze: Training-Free Active Focus for UHR Remote Sensing Understanding

    Sep 23, 2026Yao Zhang, Pengyu Dai, Wei Guo +5Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingRemote Sensing VLMs

    Wuhan University

  9. Selective Tool Use for Agentic Change Visual Question Answering in Remote Sensing

    Sep 13, 2026Yakoub Bazi, Mohamad M. Al Rahhal, Mohamed A. Mekhtiche +1Remote Sensing VQATool Use in VLMs

    Computer Engineering Department, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia · Applied Computer Science Department, College of Applied Computer Science, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia

  10. LongEarth-R1: Benchmarking and Aligning Vision-Language Models for Long-Horizon Earth Observation Reasoning

    Aug 13, 2026Yupan Ding, Jing Xiao, Zhenyuan Zhang +4Remote SensingRemote Sensing VQA

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China · School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China · Xi’an University of Electronic Science and Technology, Xi’an, China +1

  11. Summarize First, Download Later: Onboard VLMs for Bandwidth-Efficient Earth Observation

    Aug 7, 2026Junghwan Park, Sangcheol Sim, Woojin Cho +1Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingRemote Sensing VQA

    TelePIX · 07330, Seoul, South Korea

  12. Beyond Zooming: Learning Multi-Tool Visual Reasoning for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing

    Jul 28, 2026Fengxiang Wang, Jiangnan Huang, Mingshuo Chen +8RL for Tool UseRemote Sensing VQA

    National University of Defense Technology · Wuhan University · Tsinghua University

  13. Multimodal Large Language Models for Remote Sensing Image Understanding: Domain-Specific or General-Purpose?

    Jul 22, 2026Qiwei Ma, Chunping Qiu, Xinjun Cheng +5Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingRemote Sensing VQA

    School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China · Intelligent Game and Decision Lab (IGDL), Beijing, 100091, China · cYuelushan Center for Industrial Innovation, Changsha, 410082, China

  14. More with Less: a Large Scale Remote Sensing VLM with a Simple Recipe

    Jul 17, 2026Stefan Maria Ailuro, Mario Markov, Mohammad Mahdi +2Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingRemote Sensing VQA

    INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"

  15. JL1-CC&QA: Extending the JL1-CD Benchmark with Change Captioning and Question Answering

    Jun 30, 2026Ziyuan Liu, Ruifei Zhu, Ouqiao Ma +1Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingRemote Sensing VQA

    Department of Electronic Engineering, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co., Ltd. (CGSTL) Changchun 130102, China · College of Communications Engineering, Army Engineering University of PLA, Nanjing 210007, China

  16. FlameVQA: A Physically-Grounded UAV Wildfire VQA Benchmark with Radiometric Thermal Supervision

    Jun 25, 2026Mobin Habibpour, John Spodnik, Niloufar Alipour Talemi +1VLM EvaluationVisual Question Answering

    Clemson University · Clemson, SC, USA

  17. A Unified Framework for Efficient Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering: Adapting Dual, Hybrid, and Encoder-Decoder Architectures

    Jun 17, 2026Timothy Agboada, Shikha Chandel, Yadav Raj Ghimire +1Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingVisual Question Answering

    Computational Data Science and Engineering North Carolina A&T State University Greensboro - NC, USA · College of Science and Technology North Carolina A&T State University Greensboro - NC, USA

  18. Earth-OneVision: Extending Remote Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models to More Sensor Modalities and Tasks

    Jun 9, 2026Miaoxin Cai, Guanqun Wang, Wei Zhang +6Multimodal UnderstandingMultimodal Grounding

    National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Space-Born Intelligent Information Processing (SBIIP), Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China · Advanced Research Institute of Multidisciplinary Sciences, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China · School of Mechatronical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China +5

  19. ForestHG-Trace: Traceable Long-Horizon Ecological Reasoning over Large-Scale Forest Scenes

    May 26, 2026Zihang Cheng, Duanchu Wang, Cheng Li +3Remote Sensing VQATool-Using Vision-Language Agents

    Xi’an Jiaotong University · Xidian University · Zhejiang University

  20. GeoVista: Visually Grounded Active Perception for Vision-Language Understanding of Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

    May 14, 2026Jiashun Zhu, Ronghao Fu, Jiasen Hu +3Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingRemote Sensing VQA

    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

  21. Towards a Large Language-Vision Question Answering Model for MSTAR Automatic Target Recognition

    May 11, 2026David F. Ramirez, Tim L. Overman, Kristen Jaskie +2Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingRemote Sensing VQA

    SenSIP Center, School of ECEE, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona · Prime Solutions Group, Goodyear, Arizona

  22. Geospatial-Temporal Sensemaking of Remote Sensing Activity Detections with Multimodal Large Language Model

    May 11, 2026David F. Ramirez, Tim Overman, Kristen Jaskie +1Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingVisual Question Answering

    SenSIP Center, School of ECEE, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA · Prime Solutions Group Inc, Goodyear, Arizona, USA

  23. One Adapter, Every Resolution: Gated Low-Rank Adaptation for Remote Sensing VLMs

    May 8, 2026Song Zhang, Yanlong Chen, Yining Chen +2Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingRemote Sensing VQA

    Nanjing University · ETH Zurich · Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications

  24. WildFireVQA: A Large-Scale Radiometric Thermal VQA Benchmark for Aerial Wildfire Monitoring

    Apr 22, 2026Mobin Habibpour, Niloufar Alipour Talemi, John Spodnik +2Thermal ImagingVisual Question Answering

    Clemson University

  25. Revisiting Change VQA in Remote Sensing with Structured and Native Multimodal Qwen Models

    Apr 20, 2026Yakoub Bazi, Mohamad M. Al Rahhal, Mansour Zuair +1VLM EvaluationRemote Sensing Image Understanding

    Computer Engineering Department, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia · Applied Computer Science Department, College of Applied Computer Science, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia

  26. RS-HyRe-R1: A Hybrid Reward Mechanism to Overcome Perceptual Inertia for Remote Sensing Images Understanding

    Apr 19, 2026Gaozhi Zhou, Hu He, Peng Shen +8Vision-Language ModelsVisual Question Answering

    School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China · School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China

  27. Decoding the Delta: Unifying Remote Sensing Change Detection and Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models

    Apr 15, 2026Xiaohe Li, Jiahao Li, Kaixin Zhang +5Remote Sensing Change DetectionRemote Sensing VQA

    Beijing, China Aerospace Information Research Institute, CAS · Beijing, China Space Engineering University · Beijing, China Capital Normal University

  28. GeoMMBench and GeoMMAgent: Toward Expert-Level Multimodal Intelligence in Geoscience and Remote Sensing

    Apr 10, 2026Aoran Xiao, Shihao Cheng, Yonghao Xu +3Remote Sensing BenchmarksRemote Sensing VQA

    RIKEN AIP · Wuhan University · Linköping University +2

  29. Are VLMs Lost Between Sky and Space? LinkS2^2Bench for UAV-Satellite Dynamic Cross-View Spatial Intelligence

    Apr 2, 2026Dian Liu, Jie Feng, Di Li +4Visual Spatial ReasoningVLM Evaluation

    Xidian University, China · Qinghai Normal University, China · Sun Yat-sen University, China

  30. BigEarthNet.txt: A Large-Scale Multi-Sensor Image-Text Dataset and Benchmark for Earth Observation

    Mar 31, 2026Johann-Ludwig Herzog, Mathis Jürgen Adler, Leonard Hackel +5Remote SensingRemote Sensing Benchmarks

    BIFOLD and Technische Universität Berlin · University of Trento · National Technical University and National Observatory of Athens