Remote Sensing

Remote sensing multimodal large language models (RS-MLLMs) have advanced scene understanding and visual question answering over satellite imagery, yet localizing specific objects or changed regions remains challenging. Existing approaches rely on generating bounding box coordinates as token sequences, which is fragile for the small, densely packed objects common in remote sensing and increasingly error-prone when multiple targets must be localized simultaneously. In this work, we present an RS-specific formulation of the region selection paradigm, previously explored in natural-image MLLMs, and extend it to temporal change localization over multi-image sequences. Our framework employs a text-conditioned region proposal module, encodes each candidate as special tokens carrying per-frame visual features enriched with spatial and temporal cues, and lets the LLM localize targets by selecting region tokens in its response. We construct a multi-task training and evaluation suite spanning localization, referring expression, visual grounding, and understanding tasks across single-image and multi-temporal settings. Experiments show that our approach substantially outperforms coordinate-generation baselines on temporal change localization, while improving single-image visual grounding and maintaining competitive understanding performance. Oracle analysis decomposes the contributions of the region proposer and the LLM selector, providing diagnostic insight unique to this framework. Our code will be available at https://github.com/juwan-kr/RS-RegionSelect.

Answering what-if queries about a scene with a VLM usually means injecting the assumption as text or repainting the scene with a generative model. We instead move the edit to the representation level, before the model input. The image is abstracted into a set of object-level tokens, and the original image never enters the VLM. This design rests on an open question: when do frozen VLMs actually respond to such token edits? We introduce an answer-key-free protocol: no post-edit answer is annotated. It scores edits whose answers are logically determined, and audits itself by reversing each scoreable choice. The protocol reveals three structures. The response is not free: explicit edit teaching, not ordinary VQA training, produces it in dense scenes and multiplies it in sparse ones, on all three operations. Once on, it is governed by token cleanliness and density, with deployable detector+segmenter tokens competitive with the oracle and outperforming it on VRSBench. And reading is a separable axis: the image-free token route preserves 92-96% of a matched patch-token baseline's free-text VQA, and the answers measurably depend on the tokens. The response, cleanliness, and reading structures are sign-preserved across two remote-sensing datasets (iSAID, VRSBench) and three frozen LM backbones. We release the probe generator, records, judge logs, and code.

Contrastive language-image learning (CLIP) has become a key paradigm for remote sensing vision-language understanding. However, existing remote sensing contrastive learning methods are mostly built on RGB-oriented CLIP architectures, making it difficult to exploit heterogeneous sensors such as SAR, multi-spectral imaging (MSI), and hyperspectral imaging (HSI). To address this limitation, we propose OmniRSCLIP, an end-to-end contrastive learning framework that supports multi-source sensor inputs for remote sensing vision-language modeling. The key idea is to extend CLIP beyond its fixed RGB input interface without breaking the pretrained visual knowledge. To this end, OmniRSCLIP introduces Spectral-Spatial Basis Decomposition (SSBD), which formulates arbitrary-channel adaptation as a basis recomposition problem: pretrained CLIP patch embeddings provide transferable spatial bases, while wavelength-conditioned coefficients span sensor-specific embedding kernels within a constrained visual prior space. This design avoids forcing heterogeneous sensors into a fixed-channel input space, while aligning them in a unified image-text semantic space. We further introduce a spectral-context-aware mask-based contrastive learning scheme to suppress modality-specific redundant features and enhance fine-grained image-text alignment. Finally, to support multi-modal training, we construct OmniRS5M, the first large-scale remote sensing image-text corpus covering RGB, SAR, MSI, and HSI. Experiments on retrieval, zero-shot classification, and semantic localization show that OmniRSCLIP preserves strong RGB-domain performance while effectively extending CLIP to heterogeneous remote sensing modalities.

Remote sensing visual models have continuously advanced various interpretation tasks. However, the research process behind model improvement still heavily relies on manual expertise, requiring extensive trial-and-error iterations in model design, data processing, and performance diagnosis. Existing agent-based approaches mainly focus on task execution and workflow orchestration, while lacking the capability of autonomous research iteration for continuous performance optimization. To address this issue, we propose RingMoClaw, an experience-inspired self-evolving multi-agent framework for remote sensing visual interpretation. RingMoClaw integrates a research branch, a quality-control branch, and a dual-stream dynamic experience bus to establish a closed-loop optimization process covering strategy generation, experiment execution, independent review, and experience accumulation. The heterogeneous Critic mechanism provides stage-wise diagnosis and feedback, while the dual-stream experience bus incorporates external knowledge and internal experimental experience to guide strategy evolution and eliminate ineffective searches. Extensive experiments on four remote sensing downstream tasks, including object detection, scene classification, semantic segmentation, and change detection, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of RingMoClaw. Compared with the corresponding baseline models, RingMoClaw improves performance by 1.84% mAP$_{50}$ on object detection and achieves consistent gains across the other three tasks, while reducing the required evolution steps by over 40% compared with existing research automation frameworks. These results suggest that RingMoClaw offers a feasible route from task execution toward continuous research driven model evolution in remote sensing.

Recent advances in large language models and multimodal models have pushed remote sensing (RS) processing from simple perception models to agentic systems designed to tackle complex, long-horizon RS tasks. However, existing systems often rely on monolithic decision-making frameworks, which fail to accommodate the multi-stage, interdependent nature of RS tasks. This centralized approach leads to challenges such as unstable task execution, incorrect tool usage, and error propagation across stages. To address these issues, we propose HiRS-Agent, a hierarchical multi-agent system for long-horizon RS task solving. HiRS-Agent adopts a two-level collaborative architecture: the Manager Layer handles dynamic routing, step-level verification, replanning, and termination control, while the Specialist Layer organizes domain-specific tools according to the RS workflow and is responsible for subtask reasoning and tool execution. To further enhance the system's capability, we introduce a two-stage supervised tuning strategy and a verification-guided hierarchical reinforcement learning stage to jointly optimize coordination and tool-use policies. Experiments on Earth-Agent Benchmark and ThinkGeo show that HiRS-Agent substantially improves long-horizon tool-use capability and final-task correctness, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured multi-agent collaboration for reliable RS agents. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/IntelliSensing/HiRS-Agent.

Timely post-disaster building damage assessment from satellite imagery is a critical engineering decision support task, yet it remains constrained by class imbalance, ambiguous intermediate damage states, and limited cross-event transferability. This study presents, to our knowledge, the first application of Grassmann-Plucker (GP) token mixing to computer vision and introduces two extensions for image classification: the Quantum-inspired Grassmann-Plucker (QGP) head and the Hybrid Quantum Machine Learning Grassmann-Plucker (HQML-GP) head. The GP head represents multiscale relationships among image patch tokens by encoding subspaces formed by token pairs with Plucker coordinates; QGP enriches these coordinates with amplitude-derived probability features, whereas HQML-GP incorporates expectation values generated by a simulated quantum circuit into the geometric token representation. Paired pre- and post-event image patches from the xBD tornado dataset were processed using a frozen six-channel Vision Transformer base encoder with 16 x 16-pixel patches. The three GP-based heads were compared with multilayer perceptron and Transformer baselines under identical training, checkpoint selection, and evaluation protocols. Joplin and Moore tornado samples were used for model development and seen-event testing, while Tuscaloosa was reserved for unseen-event evaluation. QGP led both test sets in accuracy and macro-F1: 83.46% and 64.50% for the seen events, and 66.45% and 52.70% for the unseen event. Although HQML-GP obtained the highest validation macro-F1 of 65.63%, it did not surpass QGP on either test set and required substantially more training time per epoch. These results establish GP token mixing as a competitive attention-free alternative to conventional Transformer-based token mixing for paired satellite image damage classification.

The unprecedented surge in Earth observation data volume and diversity has exposed a critical bottleneck for traditional manual workflows, catalyzing the emergence of Remote Sensing (RS) Agents. However, the practical deployment of these advanced agents is severely hindered by their heavy reliance on large-scale general-purpose LLMs, which lack deep domain expertise and impose prohibitive infrastructure demands. To resolve this, we propose SimCRAFT, a model-agnostic framework that distills sophisticated RS orchestration capabilities into a compact 7B-scale model. Addressing data scarcity, we first pair a multiagent synthesis engine with a Mock Execution Engine that checks schema correctness, inter-tool dependencies, and sensor/tool compatibility, producing SimRS-14k, a large-scale, constraint-validated workflow planning corpus. Second, we propose Contextual Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (CRAFT) that finetunes the model to reason analogically by adapting retrieved Standard Operating Procedures to novel queries under a noise-robust objective, generalizing RAFT to multi-step RS workflow planning without mechanical copying. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SimCRAFT-7B significantly outperforms openweights LLMs and rivals advanced closedsource models and specialized RS agents, while reproducing across three 7B backbones. This work contributes a competitive open-weights baseline for lightweight RS intelligence, enabling efficient autonomous deployment under resource-constrained or resource-conserving conditions.

Salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (ORSI-SOD) requires dense predictions that preserve object completeness and structural continuity under complex backgrounds, scale variation, and irregular object shapes. Existing methods often localize salient regions, but their predictions may still suffer from structural degradation, including fragmented, incomplete, or locally missing foreground responses. This degradation is closely related to hierarchical feature propagation, where shallow details can introduce texture-induced background responses, deep semantics may over-smooth weak structures, and uncontrolled cross-scale fusion can disturb coherent regions. To address this issue, we propose a novel Structure-Preserving Local-Global Mamba Network, SPLG-Mamba, for ORSI-SOD. Specifically, SPLG-Mamba integrates Smooth-Detail Recalibration (SDR), hierarchy-aware Local-Global Mamba, and Gated Cross-Scale Fusion (GCSF). SDR recalibrates smoothed responses and detail residuals before state-space modeling, Local-Global Mamba assigns local modeling to shallow feature levels and global modeling to deep feature levels, and GCSF controls cross-scale detail injection during decoding. Experiments on ORSSD, EORSSD, and ORSI-4199 demonstrate state-of-the-art results and improved structural completeness and continuity. The code is available at https://github.com/yxu9910/SPLG-Mamba

Remote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) converts bitemporal imagery into a sentence describing semantic changes. Most RSICC methods condition caption decoders directly on fused visual features, leaving intermediate change structure and decoder-interface consistency less studied. We present HIMEC, combining Directional Change Representation (DCR) with fixed-interface decoding. DCR separates signed differences into appearance-oriented, disappearance-oriented, and shared-context streams before fusion. A learned-query encoder converts the fused representation into visually conditioned change-query tokens that form the scene decoder's only sample-dependent memory. A training-only auxiliary phrase decoder supplies caption-derived supervision. With a fixed zero input, the scene decoder maintains the same interface during training and inference. Separately, we evaluate a local-to-scene cascade conditioned on teacher-forced local states during training and autoregressive states at inference. On changed LEVIR-CC validation pairs, these states have a mean cosine distance of 0.69. Regime-matched conditioning recovers most of the associated deficit, whereas permuting state correspondence causes no detectable penalty. These findings are limited to the evaluated cascade. In a matched three-seed comparison, HIMEC reaches a Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation (CIDEr) score of $142.81\pm0.60$ on LEVIR-CC, versus $139.51\pm3.40$ for direct fused-feature memory. On SECOND-CC, fixed-zero and regime-matched diagnostic conditioning reach 75.67 and 76.99 CIDEr, respectively, versus 60.77 for the mismatched cascade. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ayshaashra/HIMEC upon publication.

Rapid urbanization in Dhaka District, Bangladesh has triggered substantial alterations in land use and environmental conditions, necessitating systematic monitoring for informed urban planning and ecological sustainability. This study employs remote sensing data and machine learning techniques to analyze spatiotemporal changes in land cover and vegetation dynamics between 2019 and 2024. High-resolution satellite imagery from Sentinel-2 MSI and Landsat 8 was utilized to classify land cover types and compute spectral indices including the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI), and Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI). A supervised machine learning approach incorporating Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Random Forest classifiers was applied using labeled geospatial training points within Google Earth Engine. Accuracy assessments were conducted using confusion matrices and kappa statistics. Results indicate a 59.5% increase in urban built-up areas and a significant decline in vegetation (-8.46%) and water bodies (-7.77%) over the five-year period. Land conversion from vegetated and aquatic areas to urban infrastructure was identified as a dominant trend. Among the models, Random Forest demonstrated the highest classification accuracy. These findings underscore the growing environmental pressures driven by unregulated urban expansion in Dhaka. The study highlights the potential of remote sensing and machine learning tools in providing timely, actionable data to support sustainable urban development, land-use regulation, and ecosystem conservation policies.

Federated learning (FL) in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations is affected by non-IID data and irregular ground-station visibility, both driven by orbital geometry. Global aggregation performs poorly when orbit-level class distributions are disjoint, while strong personalisation can be excessive when these distributions overlap. We present FedOrbit, which combines continuous orbit-level training over inter-satellite links, class-aware hierarchical aggregation, quality-weighted feature aggregation with return-rate dampening, and adaptive feature decomposition based on inter-orbit class similarity. Across three remote-sensing benchmarks and two non-IID partitions, FedOrbit achieves the highest accuracy in five of six settings and is within $0.9$ percentage points of the best result in the sixth. The gains over the strongest baseline reach $16.1$ percentage points under Dirichlet partitioning and $8.6$ under pathological partitioning, with the smallest per-orbit accuracy spread in five of six settings.

Semantic segmentation models are trained and evaluated against human-drawn masks, yet remote-sensing annotations are often coarse, incomplete, or misaligned; high overlap scores may then reflect agreement with imperfect labels rather than faithfulness to the image, creating an evaluation paradox. We introduce Contrastive Mask Fidelity (CMF), a training-free, reference-free metric that scores competing class masks directly against image evidence. CMF composites keep and erase counterfactual views of each mask and asks a frozen vision-language judge whether class evidence is concentrated inside the mask and absent outside. We validate CMF on controlled mask corruptions, then audit 10,731 image-class pairs across ten remote-sensing benchmarks using candidate masks from Seg-Probe, a training-free open-vocabulary probe built on SegEarth-OV3 that outperforms prior baselines on nine of ten datasets. The audit reveals systematic, class-dependent annotation distortion: man-made classes such as buildings, roads, and cars favor the candidate mask on 62-85% of pairs, whereas ambiguous land cover more often favors human annotations. On a blinded three-annotator consensus, CMF matches expert judgment on 81% of pairs, exceeding keep-only scoring, model confidence, and a trained label-quality baseline. Finally, conservative class-wise arbitration yields supervision that improves cross-domain transfer over raw annotations and matched replacement controls, positioning CMF as a scalable tool for auditing ground truth rather than presuming it infallible.

This work presents a unified multimodal AI system for damage assessment that integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models, thermal spectrum perception, vision foundation model pipelines, and exploratory wireless signal sensing. A RAG component is developed to ground a locally hosted language model in project-specific documentation, including specialized damage level classification criteria to mitigate hallucinations during inference. Controlled comparisons against static few-shot prompting demonstrate that dynamic retrieval improves grounding and factual consistency. We further compare vector-based RAG with a knowledge graph variant constructed via entity-relation extraction, and show that graph-based retrieval produces stronger responses for damage assessment queries requiring cross-document reasoning, motivating hybrid dense, sparse, and graph-aware retrieval. To address limitations of EO imagery under adverse lighting and weather conditions, infrared (IR)/thermal sensing is employed for object detection and segmentation. Our detectors generate candidate detections, yielding improved segmentation of a broad array of objects. Paired IR versus visible spectrum tracking experiments reveal failure modes, motivating multimodal fusion for robust object detection and damage analysis. Vision foundation and vision-language models are leveraged to generate synthetic damage imagery and classify damage severity with high accuracy, supporting training and validation of downstream damage assessment models. Finally, exploratory Wireless-based sensing demonstrates potential to detect presence, motion, and post-event environmental changes where EO and IR sensing are ineffective.

Spoken language offers a natural, hands-free interface for specifying an arbitrary target in dense remote-sensing imagery, yet existing referring remote-sensing image segmentation benchmarks accept only written expressions. To bridge this gap, we introduce \dataset, a spoken-query benchmark derived from RISBench that adds accent- and voice-diverse speech while preserving the original image, mask, and data splits. Its hard evaluation sets combine rotor, wind, and mixed interference with three signal-to-noise levels. We also propose \model, an efficient bilateral network that combines a boundary-preserving visual path with token-preserving speech encoding, kernel linear cross-modal attention, and a resolution refinement head. The design conditions visual features at two scales without materializing a dense speech--visual affinity matrix, then restores fine boundaries using high-resolution visual features. On the clean test split, \model with Swin-Base achieves 62.09% mean intersection over union (mIoU) and 68.22% overall intersection over union (oIoU), outperforming the strongest audio-adapted remote-sensing baseline by 5.38 and 2.08 percentage points, respectively. It retains the best hard-set mIoU at 54.09%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark and model study of full-sentence spoken-query referring segmentation for remote-sensing imagery. The code will be made publicly available.

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a widely used satellite-derived measure of urban surface heat, but there is no shared benchmark for forecasting it at 30 m. Prior studies usually cover one to three cities, use kilometer-scale products, or do not release data and code. We introduce HeatCast, a Landsat-based benchmark for monthly LST forecasting across 124 U.S. cities from 2013 through June 2025. HeatCast contains 30 m monthly tiles with LST, elevation, surfacereflectance RGB, three spectral indices, broadband albedo, quality masks, and Local Climate Zone (LCZ) labels, together with a fixed temporal split, LCZ-stratified metrics, and a reference evaluation harness. We evaluate a CNN+LSTM and Earthformer on next-month forecasting, where Earthformer reaches 7.74 K RMSE against 10.42 K for the CNN+LSTM. Forecasting from the eight nonLST channels alone reaches 7.72 K, against 8.15 K from LST history and 8.68 K from RGB. The data, code, and weights are released under MIT at https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/9889.

With the rapid growth of Earth observation technologies, remote sensing archives are rapidly expanding, making remote sensing image-text retrieval (RS-ITR) increasingly important. However, continual RS-ITR remains challenging because scale variation and distribution shifts in RS aggravate cross-modal alignment space distortion, making it difficult for existing continual learning (CL) methods to support reliable continual retrieval. To address this challenge, we propose DARAD, a dual-adapter and ranking-aware distillation framework that preserves the historical cross-modal ranking structure while learning new visual and textual concepts from evolving archives. Specifically, the visual branch introduces a spatial fusion adapter, which integrates coarse regional cues and fine-grained patch cues to accommodate RS scale variation while anchoring visual updates to the pretrained alignment space. The textual branch employs multi-expert semantic routing, which separates shared textual semantics from semantically specialized residuals to absorb newly emerging descriptions while constraining global text embedding drift. Furthermore, bidirectional ranking distillation uses a frozen teacher model and historical anchors to preserve the historical cross-modal ranking structure, thereby mitigating alignment space distortion across continual stages. Experiments under a multi-stage continual retrieval protocol show that DARAD achieves superior performance over existing CL methods, improving adaptation to newly arrived data while maintaining effectiveness on historical data.

Verifying the authenticity of satellite imagery has become increasingly critical given advances in generative artificial intelligence. Highly realistic synthetic imagery produced for malicious purposes (deepfakes) can have major consequences in the remote sensing domain, where this data is a fundamental source of information for science applications, planning, logistics, and monitoring. The remote sensing community lacks high-quality, fine-grained manipulation datasets suitable for training and evaluating detection and image forensics algorithms. Existing datasets are lacking and those that do exist either provide no ground truth masks for evaluating manipulation localization, or consist of entire images generated by GANs or diffusion models, which are inadequate for measuring localization performance. To address this gap, we describe a preliminary dataset construction process and prototype benchmark dataset for satellite image manipulation detection and localization. The dataset contains 60 images total, with 30 images carefully manipulated using three manipulation types including copy-paste splicing and diffusion model inpainting, and 30 authentic images. Each image is accompanied by a ground-truth mask and acquisition metadata, enabling both pixel-level localization metrics, image metadata studies, and analyses of how manipulation detection performance relates to image collection parameters. We describe the dataset construction process and present this initial release to support further research in image forensics and geospatial deepfake detection. The prototype dataset can be downloaded at https://huggingface.co/datasets/geodf/fmow-fake-small.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of deep learning models across decentralized image archives without requiring data centralization. This paradigm is particularly relevant in remote sensing (RS), where legal regulations, privacy concerns, and bandwidth constraints restrict data sharing. However, the presence of training data heterogeneity across clients (known as non-IID data) can impede convergence and limit the generalization capability of the aggregated global model. To mitigate the adverse effects of training data heterogeneity, vision-language models (VLMs) can be leveraged in FL due to their transferable representations, which have demonstrated robustness under distribution shifts. However, their large parameter size may substantially increase communication overhead and local computational complexity in federated settings. Therefore, it is crucial to select an appropriate VLM adaptation strategy that balances the generalization ability with the communication and computational constraints. To address this issue, in this paper, we present the first comparative study of VLM adaptation strategies for FL in the context of RS image classification. We investigate full fine-tuning, encoder-specific fine-tuning, prompt learning, and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) tuning, and analyze them with respect to three criteria: 1) generalization capability under non-IID data, 2) communication overhead, and 3) local computational complexity. Experiments on BigEarthNet-S2, EuroSAT, RESISC45, and ImageNet reveal distinct trade-offs between task specialization, cross-domain generalization, and efficiency. Based on our findings, we derive a guideline for the selection of an appropriate VLM adaptation strategy in FL for RS image classification under different operational constraints. The code of this work is publicly available at https://git.tu-berlin.de/rsim/FL-RS-VLM.

Benchmarking deep learning (DL) models for multi-label classification (MLC) of remote sensing images (RSI) typically yields rankings that do not generalize beyond the evaluated datasets. In this work, we move beyond rankings by employing functional analysis of variance (fANOVA) to systematically quantify the contributions of individual design choices and their interactions to performance variability. We conduct two empirical analyses covering 48 and 20 DL models, respectively, spanning design choices such as network architecture, fine-tuning strategy, learning strategy, and initialization. By applying fANOVA across seven MLC RSI datasets, we construct dataset meta-representations that capture design-choice sensitivity profiles. Hierarchical clustering of these meta-representations reveals that datasets naturally group according to how they respond to design decisions, with patterns strongly linked to intrinsic dataset properties such as scale, spatial resolution, and label space complexity. Our findings show that for large-scale datasets, fine-tuning strategy and architecture are dominant factors, while in data-limited regimes, initialization becomes decisive. For intermediate regimes, the interaction between architecture and learning strategy governs performance.

Dense image matching establishes pixel-wise correspondences and underpins broad applications in computer vision and photogrammetry. However, extending dense matching to global-scale remote sensing remains challenging because image pairs may differ in acquisition time, season, viewpoint, spatial resolution, and land-cover state. The resulting large geometric offsets, partial overlap, and intrinsically unmatchable regions make direct dense correspondence prediction unreliable and inefficient. We thus reformulate dense matching as localization-and-registration: first localizing the matchable overlap and affine geometry, then refining dense residuals within the aligned frame. Based on this formulation, we propose LoRetta, a foundation model coupling matchability-aware affine localization with guided dense registration. We also introduce LEVIR-GM, a global-scale multi-temporal optical matching benchmark with dataset-native matchability labels (103K aligned, 827K augmented pairs, six continents, five years, 0.5-1024 m resolution). We further establish a unified evaluation protocol for sparse, semi-dense, and dense matchers. On LEVIR-GM, LoRetta achieves an area under the curve (AUC) of 83.3%, outperforming the strongest baseline RoMa v2 by 1.6 points, with larger percentage of correct keypoints (PCK) gains of 6.5 and 8.2 points at 1 and 2 pixels, while reducing inference latency by 47.8%. Astronaut-to-satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-to-satellite geolocalization experiments further demonstrate its transferability as a reusable geometric aligner.

Prompt-driven vision-language models (VLMs) hold immense promise for accelerating dense remote sensing (RS) annotation, but static models suffer from severe performance degradation when deployed on novel scenes, unseen categories, or visually confusing backgrounds. Moreover, existing unified paradigms primarily rely on intra-image specific prompts, lacking flexible task routing to adapt to multi-intent operational workflows. In practical batch mapping, annotators typically refine a small set of representative samples before processing large datasets. Motivated by this practice, we propose UniEvo-RS, an omni-prompt unified RS segmentation framework equipped with representative exemplar-driven prototype evolution. First, we construct a multi-instruction prompt dataset that unifies text-driven and visual-driven prompts within a single architecture, establishing a dynamic task-routing mechanism for highly diverse RS annotation scenarios. Second, we introduce a representative feedback-driven, training-free prototype evolution mechanism. By contrasting manual annotations with initial predictions on exemplars, UniEvo-RS distills prediction errors into positive and negative prototypes. These prototypes enhance LLM query recall and suppress spatial background noise under a fixed-budget clustering memory. Extensive experiments show that UniEvo-RS unifies diverse prompting tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across most settings. Crucially, with minimal interaction on a few exemplars, it enables training-free, progressive accuracy enhancement on unseen categories during batch annotation.

Remote sensing semantic segmentation is hindered by costly pixel-level annotations, motivating training-free open-vocabulary methods. Recently, the recent release of DINOv3 brings DINO.txt, which equips the standalone DINO backbone with image-text contrastive learning and thus opens up the possibility of open-vocabulary segmentation. We propose DinoSplat-OV, a training-free framework that adapts DINOv3 to remote sensing without fine-tuning or additional pretraining. Targeting the dense distribution, multi-scale nature, and large size of remote sensing imagery, we design two core modules. Its Text-aware Laplacian Propagation module de-noises patch-level predictions by combining textual semantic affinities with local visual similarity, improving regional consistency while preserving boundaries. Its Gaussian Splatting Upsampling module reconstructs pixel-level features through RGB-guided anisotropic aggregation and test-time optimization. A global-anchor sliding-window strategy further supports large-scale imagery. Experiments on UDD5, DOTA, and LoveDA demonstrate competitive or superior performance over existing training-free methods, effectively filling the gap of DINO-series models in training-free open-vocabulary segmentation and providing a viable new path for further advances in this direction.

Interactive segmentation reduces the prohibitive cost of pixel-level annotation by allowing users to delineate objects with a few clicks. However, applying this paradigm directly to remote sensing imagery is non-trivial: ultra-high resolutions, small object sizes, and sparse spatial distributions all degrade segmentation quality. Recent work has addressed the resolution barrier and achieved competitive results in interactive segmentation for remote sensing (ISRS). However, they treat all instances of a class within an image as a single objective target. Consequently, interactions spent on one object contribute nothing to its same-class neighbours, and satisfactory masks may demand up to 40 clicks per image, hindering the practicality of these frameworks. We observe that remote sensing scenes exhibit markedly strong inter-object correlation, meaning a single clicked object is highly informative about the rest of its category. Building on this, we propose ISRS-DETR, a detection-guided interactive segmentation framework that injects object-level evidence into both training and inference. Our ISRS-DETR employs an RF-DETR decoder with the interactive segmentation backbone to localise co-occurring same-class objects, and introduces a Dynamic Top-K Click Selection strategy that retains only reliable proposals and converts each into a simulated click, so one user interaction propagates across an entire class. Experiments on three standard remote sensing benchmarks show that ISRS-DETR achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while substantially reducing Number of Clicks per Image (NoC-I). All codes and data splits will be released for reproducibility upon acceptance.

Remote-sensing videos enable real-time observation of changes in target attributes, short-term activities, and scene evolution. They record motion, actions, interactions, and scene changes that cannot be captured by isolated images. Existing models primarily target single images or discrete temporal observations spanning a long time range. However, a unified evaluation setting for assessing vision-language models on continuous remote-sensing video understanding remains lacking. We introduce RSVideo-10K, a remote-sensing video dataset comprising 10,773 instances, 1.47 million frames, and 17.02 hours of footage, containing both unmanned aerial vehicles and satellite platforms. Its fixed evaluation benchmark, RSVideo-Bench, contains 2,731 test instances and evaluates two complementary aspects of remote-sensing video understanding: L1 Perception and L2 Reasoning, spanning seven capability groups and 17 tasks. Evaluations show that current vision-language models still struggle to recover small local evidence, track short-lived states, and use scene-constrained spatial relations. Based on this analysis, we further propose RSVideo, a reinforcement learning framework for small-target spatiotemporal focusing that selects question-relevant regions across frames and suppresses redundant background tokens. RSVideo achieves a maximum absolute improvement of 9.01% with InternVL3.5-14B and attains the highest accuracy of 40.63% with Qwen3.6-27B across 26 open-source vision-language backbones. Codes will be available at https://github.com/HongjieZhou0329/RSVideo.

Bi-temporal remote-sensing disaster change captioning often needs to identify sparse and spatially localized changes across large pre- and post-event scenes and then translate them into coherent, factual descriptions. However, existing change captioning methods always follow an autoregressive decoding paradigm to generate the change description and thus an early misinterpretation of the changed object, event, or spatial relation becomes an irreversible premise for subsequent text, amplifying visual ambiguity into cascading factual errors. To address this limitation, we propose EchoChange, a multimodal discrete diffusion language model that formulates change captioning as iterative masked-token denoising rather than left-to-right generation. By repeatedly revising the entire caption while conditioning on the image pair, EchoChange can reconsider uncertain content and correct imperfect intermediate predictions. We further introduce draft-aware dual-pass training, a progressive masking curriculum, and confidence-guided remasking to align training with iterative inference. Extensive experiments on the RSCC benchmark show that EchoChange substantially outperforms both general-purpose and remote-sensing-specific baselines across lexical and semantic metrics. The EchoChange Project is at https://github.com/sundongwei/EchoChange_Project

Indonesia's relocation of its political and administrative capital from Jakarta to Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) has been framed around a Forest City vision, yet rapid construction within the Core Government Area (KIPP) raises concerns over land conversion, vegetation loss, and carbon stock decline. This study applies remote sensing techniques to systematically assess land use and vegetation cover change in KIPP from 2021 to 2026 using PlanetScope SuperDove satellite imagery. Cloud-free mosaics were prepared and analysed through spectral indices, including the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalised Difference Red Edge (NDRE), and Normalised Difference Water Index (NDWI), alongside supervised land use and land cover (LULC) classification using a Support Vector Machine algorithm. Results show substantial environmental transformation, with mean NDVI declined by 17.1%, total carbon stock decreased by 0.28%, developed land expanded by 672%, and total vegetation declined by 18.1%. Vegetation loss was most extensive between 2023 and 2024, although a temporary recovery in NDVI and carbon stock occurred from 2024 to 2025 as active clearing slowed and development shifted towards already-cleared land. Overall, the findings demonstrate that remote sensing provides an effective approach for monitoring the environmental impacts of large-scale urban development, while highlighting the need for higher-resolution, hyperspectral, and SAR-based methods to improve detection of construction stages and plantation-related land cover changes.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are attractive for resource-constrained remote-sensing systems, but reliable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection remains challenging. Deep ensembles provide strong predictive uncertainty, yet require multiple complete models and backbone evaluations. We propose an efficient spiking pseudo-ensemble that attaches multiple lightweight classification heads to a frozen SNN backbone. Naively training these heads with cross-entropy can lead to diversity collapse, where independently parameterized heads may produce correlated predictions. To address this, we introduce an agree--disagree objective that preserves correct predictions on clean in-distribution samples while encouraging diversity on structured, uncertainty-inducing transformations of the same inputs. This provides a diversity-promoting training signal without requiring external OOD data. Experiments with Spikformer and ResNet19-SNN on EuroSAT demonstrate consistent improvements over conventionally trained pseudo-ensembles. Using three backbones with five heads each matches or improves upon a five-model deep ensemble on UCM and AID, while requiring approximately 38% fewer parameters and 40% fewer backbone evaluations. These results show that explicit diversity promotion can recover useful ensemble-style uncertainty at substantially lower deployment cost.

Remote-sensing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often assert facts that imagery cannot establish, such as a facility's identity or function. Coordinate-keyed geographic retrieval can supply this missing knowledge, improving fMoW land-use accuracy by 12.06--17.19 points across three open MLLMs. However, retrieved records can also contradict visible evidence, and we find that models frequently follow the records even when the image is decisive. We argue that source trust should therefore depend on \emph{cross-modal verifiability}: geographic records are most useful for attributes the image cannot verify and most dangerous when they dispute visually verifiable attributes. We introduce GeoArbiter, a training-free pipeline that operationalizes this principle by injecting only image-unverifiable geographic facts. Unlike arbitration prompts, which leak across attribute types and bias yes/no responses, content-level filtering preserves 84.69--87.15% of the full-retrieval accuracy gain, reduces claim-level hallucination by 9.58--26.34% under a source-blinded judge, and improves robustness to conflicting records across all three models. These results identify verifiability-guided content selection as a simple, effective mechanism for grounding remote-sensing MLLMs in fallible geographic knowledge.

Satellite image editing requires spatially precise object-level control, but supervised editing datasets for overhead imagery are costly to build because object masks, semantic labels, and paired edits are rarely available at scale. We introduce SatEdit, a mask-conditioned satellite image editing framework that constructs training supervision from unlabeled imagery. SatEdit proposes object masks with a seg- mentation foundation model, assigns semantic la- bels to sampled segments with a Vision-Language Model, and applies lightweight human verification before generating paired addition and removal exam- ples through mask-guided inpainting. We fine-tune a high-resolution image editing backbone with LoRA on a SODA-A-derived dataset containing 1,014 im- ages and 852 verified object annotations across 91 classes. In controlled comparisons with open- source and proprietary image editing models, SatE- dit achieves the highest aggregate masked-region se- mantic alignment, with a CLIP score of 0.6322 and CLIP delta of 0.0726, while preserving the surround- ing scene qualitatively. These results suggest that VLM-assisted segment annotation is a practical route to data-efficient, spatially controllable satellite image editing.

Existing cross-domain few-shot segmentation approaches suffer from high training costs due to source-domain episodic training and pixel-wise dense prediction, while often producing fragmented and noisy predictions. To overcome these issues, we propose a training-free entity-level few-shot segmentation framework for remote sensing images with advection refinement. Specifically, we first leverage SAM3's generic geometric priors to generate category-agnostic entity primitives. By reformulating few-shot inference from pixel-level prediction to entity-level reasoning, foreground and background prototypes are constructed and combined with dense textual semantic responses from SAM3 to build a multi-modal semantic potential field. Furthermore, an advection equation-based semantic refinement mechanism is introduced to propagate category-aware information across both feature and similarity spaces, enhancing semantic continuity and suppressing local texture noise. Extensive experiments on multiple remote sensing datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively mitigates domain shift and local noise, substantially improving SAM3's adaptation capability for remote sensing few-shot segmentation without additional training. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/yu-ni1989/ELFSS-AR.

Remote sensing scene classification is increasingly relying on foundation models pre-trained on large-scale Earth-observation data. Moreover, transductive inference, which exploits the collective statistical structure of the entire unlabeled query set, appears to naturally match remote sensing pipelines where large images are routinely split into patches and inferred as a batch. In this work, we introduce LC-TIM (Locally Consistent Transductive Information Maximization), which extends the state-of-the-art Transductive Information Maximization for Few-Shot CLIP (TIM++) objective with a local consistency regularizer that enforces prediction agreement between each query sample and its $κ$ nearest feature-space neighbors. The regularizer enters as a single multiplicative factor in the closed-form $q$-update, adding negligible computational overhead. We further propose a multi-source extension that fuses the affinity graph from multiple remote sensing foundation model, further boosting classification accuracy. To assess these methods, we establish the first comprehensive, open-source benchmark for transductive few-shot RS scene classification, evaluating LP++, TransCLIP, TIM++, and LC-TIM across ten diverse datasets, two remote sensing vision-language models, and across various few-shot settings. Our experiments show that transductive methods consistently outperform zero-shot baselines, and that LC-TIM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, with the largest gains in the low-shot regime where neighborhood cues are most informative. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/elkhouryk/LC-TIM

Effective flood monitoring is critical for minimizing the impacts of flood disasters on populations and infrastructure. Yet reliable remote sensing across extensive and environmentally diverse regions remains challenging, as most segmentation algorithms lack the generalisation capacity required for large-scale application, while annotated flood data are scarce and unevenly distributed. This study presents an end-to-end multimodal framework for Russian Federation territories sustainable flood monitoring and damage assessment based on synthetic aperture radar data, multispectral imagery, and digital elevation models with their derivatives, forming a 21-channel input. Using a self-collected multimodal dataset covering seven Russian regions, two strategies for water surface detection under limited data conditions were compared: a supervised U-Net++ model and the self-supervised AnySat architecture pre-trained and fine-tuned for the segmentation task. Under the data conditions of this study, supervised learning proved more effective, while the AnySat-based approach offered greater stability and retains advantages for settings where larger unlabelled data or missing modalities at inference are expected. The best flood area predictions were used to estimate flood impact in urban areas in terms of the area affected, material damage, casualties, and ecological and agricultural impact. The estimations were conducted following the official methodology of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations. Applied to the 2019 Tulun flood, the obtained results closely matched official assessments, except for material damage, due to the open-source databases usage. The results demonstrate the potential of deep learning and multimodal satellite data integration for scalable, reliable flood monitoring across diverse environmental and data-limited conditions.

Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote-sensing (RS) imagery provides fine-grained Earth-observation evidence over city-scale scenes, but poses a fundamental challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs): task-relevant evidence is often sparse, local, and spatially dispersed across extremely large visual contexts. A natural solution is to equip MLLMs with zoom-in tools for active local inspection. However, through a pilot study on XLRS-Bench, we find that zoom-in is only partially effective: it resolves easy and medium-level tasks with locally recoverable evidence, but saturates on hard cases requiring global search, multi-region comparison, path planning, or dispersed-evidence reasoning. Motivated by this finding, we move beyond single-tool zoom-in and introduce GeoMTVR, a large-scale Geospatial Multi-Tool Visual Reasoning dataset built from wide-area satellite imagery. GeoMTVR contains 13K UHR VQA samples with interleaved reasoning trajectories, diverse visual tool calls, and returned visual observations, enabling models to learn question decomposition, tool selection, regional inspection, object-level grounding, auxiliary visual reasoning, and cross-tool evidence integration. Beyond supervised fine-tuning, we propose a tool-attention-focused reinforcement learning algorithm that concentrates optimization on critical tool-use decisions, including when to invoke tools, which tool to select, where to apply it, and how to interpret tool outputs. By combining SFT on GeoMTVR with our RL algorithm, we develop GeoLens, a multi-tool visual reasoning MLLM for UHR RS. Experiments show that GeoLens consistently outperforms direct reasoning and single-tool zoom-in baselines, achieving stronger accuracy, better evidence grounding, and more efficient tool-use trajectories.

Remote sensing change detection aims to identify land-cover changes from bi-temporal images. Most existing methods follow a one-shot dense prediction paradigm, directly regressing a change mask from fused features. However, such approaches overlook the intrinsic frequency characteristics of change patterns. We propose Freq-RemoteVAR, a frequency autoregressive framework that reformulates change detection as a structured generation problem in the frequency domain. Instead of predicting the change mask in a single step, we introduce a next-frequency prediction paradigm, where change information is progressively generated from coarse to fine. We design a frequency-aware mask tokenization strategy that decomposes change supervision into multi-frequency token targets via Fourier transformation and quantization. We develop a Frequency VAR Transformer, which performs causal autoregressive modeling over frequency tokens. The model starts from learned mask queries and progressively predicts frequency-level tokens conditioned on previously generated tokens and bi-temporal image features, effectively capturing long-range dependencies across frequency scales. We introduce Scale-Aligned RoPE Cross Attention (SRCA) module, which aligns frequency-domain mask queries with spatial-domain bi-temporal features under a unified coordinate system, enhancing spatial-frequency consistency during generation. We propose a Change-quality Control module that adaptively modulates the generation process through dynamic normalization, attention biasing, and spatial offset adjustment, thereby suppressing pseudo-change responses and improving robustness. Extensive experiments on CDD, GZ-CD, and LEVIR-CD demonstrate that Freq-RemoteVAR consistently outperforms existing methods, particularly in challenging scenarios with complex appearance variations and noisy disturbances.

Deploying multiple UAVs for remote sensing enables proportional reductions in mission time, but realizing these benefits requires the fleet to coordinate at runtime: distributing sensing targets, responding to platform failures, and recovering from degraded data quality. In inspection campaigns, where mission value depends on complete coverage and the usability of every capture, a centralized ground-station coordinator is a single point of failure: a lost link or station fault leaves sensing gaps that cannot be filled without operator intervention. We propose the \textbf{SwarmLink}, an inter-agent communication infrastructure that non-invasively extends any existing aerial framework with peer-to-peer coordination capability, without modifying the host system. We apply it to photovoltaic plant inspection as a representative large-scale sensing campaign, extending Aerostack2 with a distributed auction that unifies initial sensing-target allocation, platform-failure recovery, and data-quality-triggered reassignment into a single runtime mechanism. All three disruption scenarios reduce to the same re-auction over remaining targets and active platforms, requiring zero modifications to the Aerostack2 core and no ground-station involvement during the mission.

Existing remote sensing image generation methods are largely confined to single-modality synthesis and therefore fail to exploit the complementary information inherent in multimodal imagery. To address this limitation, we propose a contrastive parameter disentanglement framework for multimodal remote sensing image generation, which generates semantically consistent and structurally aligned images across multiple modalities, including optical, infrared, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR), from a single text prompt. Specifically, we introduce a contrastive parameter disentanglement module that disentangles shared semantics from modality-specific attributes at the parameter level within an orthogonal core subspace. Based on this module, we develop a disentangled optimization strategy that first constrains the parameter matrix A of the LoRA adapter to capture modality-invariant semantics through a multimodal contrastive objective and then guides multiple parameter matrices B to learn modality-specific attributes under text conditioning. This strategy enables the simultaneous generation of multimodal images with consistent semantic content and distinct modality characteristics. Furthermore, to ensure structural alignment across the generated images, we devise a query-key structure transfer mechanism that jointly models multimodal sampling trajectories during inference by transferring structural correlation priors from an anchor modality to the remaining modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art remote sensing image generation approaches in terms of generation quality, semantic consistency, and structural alignment, while also achieving superior performance in the downstream object classification task.

Remote sensing multimodal large language models (RS-MLLMs) have improved general aerial-image understanding. However, Earth observation applications require fine-grained scenario specialization, constrained by scarce high-quality scenario data and incomplete capability coverage. We formulate this adaptation as a capability-gap-driven post-training problem and propose filling before advancing (FBA). Rather than relying on single-stage supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over target-domain samples, FBA first fills prerequisite capability gaps before advancing toward scenario specialization. We instantiate FBA for coastal harbor understanding, a representative multi-source scenario, by constructing CPRS (Coastal-Port Remote Sensing), a three-layer supervision dataset coupled with three ordered stages: (1) RS semantic anchoring for overhead-view visual-language alignment; (2) domain-bridge convergence for shared RS priors across target and bridging scenarios under different modalities; and (3) evidence-grounded scenario tuning for downstream performance. We construct HarborEval, an eight-track diagnostic benchmark covering perception, spatial understanding, robustness, and generation. Under comparable training budgets, HarborEval increases from 57.95 with Direct-SFT to 70.29 with FBA on LLaVA-v1.5, and from 81.09 to 83.37 on Qwen3-VL. FBA also outperforms Collapsed-SFT and leads on harbor-related VRSBench/RSVQA subsets and OpenEval. Stage-wise and role-replacement analyses validate progressive gap filling and stage-specific roles. Public examples and release updates for CPRS, HarborEval, code, and trained weights are available at https://github.com/Z0ngL1ng/filling-before-advancing.

Adversarial attacks against large vision-language models (LVLMs) serve as an effective means of assessing their robustness in cross-modal semantic understanding. Existing studies mainly focus on corrupting visual inputs to induce predefined erroneous responses in general vision-language tasks, whereas corresponding investigations in remote sensing fields remain largely underexplored. Compared with natural image understanding, remote sensing image interpretation requires joint reasoning over local discriminative cues and global scene context. This poses additional challenges to achieving transferable semantic manipulation toward specified responses under black-box settings. To tackle these challenges, we propose GeoThreat, a transferable targeted adversarial attack method against LVLMs for remote sensing image interpretation. Specifically, GeoThreat modulates adversarial representations in accordance with the target content at both conceptual and perceptual levels. The class tokens from surrogate image encoders are employed as conceptual representations, while perceptual representations are distilled from patch tokens of the adversarial example through collaborative importance estimation. Beyond merely rolling out attention scores across layers, we incorporate adversarial-target similarity gradients to more faithfully characterize the relevance of local visual cues to the intended semantic manipulation. The perceptual representations are then dynamically aligned with target patch tokens in a cross-attentive manner, facilitating the adaptation of local cues toward designated semantic details. Finally, adversarial perturbations are iteratively updated via ensemble-based joint optimization of conceptual calibration and perceptual adaptation. Extensive experiments across diverse LVLMs demonstrate the superiority of GeoThreat in both transferability and controllability.

The rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has introduced a flexible paradigm for remote sensing image scene understanding (RSISU), enabling natural-language interaction with remote sensing imagery. However, a systematic understanding of the capability boundaries, cross-task generalization, and task-specific limitations of existing remote sensing MLLMs (RS-MLLMs) is still lacking. This paper presents a systematic survey and diagnostic evaluation of MLLMs for RSISU. We review the technical evolution of RS-MLLMs, focusing on model design, multimodal learning, training data, and downstream capabilities. We further compare RS-MLLMs with general-purpose computer vision MLLMs (CV-MLLMs) across diverse RSISU tasks and benchmarks. RS-MLLMs remain competitive in domain-specific settings, particularly remote sensing visual grounding and high-resolution visual question answering. More notably, general-purpose CV-MLLMs can match or even outperform these specialized models on several RSISU tasks without remote sensing-specific fine-tuning. These findings demonstrate the strong transferability of general-purpose CV-MLLMs and show that current RS-MLLMs do not consistently outperform them across diverse RSISU tasks. Current MLLMs also face limitations in spatial and relational reasoning, fine-grained visual understanding, instruction diversity, and generalization across heterogeneous task formats. Based on these findings, we outline future directions toward reliable evaluation, multimodal and high-resolution reasoning, efficient deployment, and tool-augmented remote sensing agents. This survey provides a systematic reference for developing robust, generalizable, and practical MLLMs for RSISU.

Remote sensing image editing aims to modify remote sensing images according to natural language instructions while preserving geographic rules and sensor observation characteristics. Existing benchmarks mainly target natural images or general visual scenes, and thus may not fully capture the reasoning, regional control, and sensor-consistency abilities required in remote sensing editing. To fill this gap, we introduce RS-RIE-Bench, the first benchmark for reasoning-guided remote sensing image editing. RS-RIE-Bench organizes tasks into three categories: temporal reasoning, causal reasoning, and spatial reasoning. These categories capture temporal evolution, causal consequence, and spatial imaging consistency in remote sensing scenes. The evaluation protocol covers three dimensions: target region plausibility, non-target region preservation, and image quality consistency. We further demonstrate the feasibility of MLLM-based evaluation through cross-judge consistency analysis and stratified expert review. Systematic evaluation on eight open-source and closed-source image editing models shows that current models still have clear limitations in reasoning-guided remote sensing editing. Even the strongest model achieves only 24.28% overall accuracy under the strict joint-satisfaction criterion, while the mean relaxed joint-4 success rate across all eight models is 32.23%. Causal reasoning and spatial reasoning remain especially challenging, and several open-source models are close to zero in some categories. These results show that RS-RIE-Bench can effectively reveal the limitations of current models in geographic reasoning, regional control, and sensor-consistent generation. It also provides a standardized benchmark and a clear research direction for future remote sensing intelligent editing models.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved remote sensing (RS) multimodal understanding. Language-conditioned segmentation is crucial for fine-grained target understanding in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) videos. However, this task remains challenging due to the prevalence of small, visually ambiguous targets and dynamic aerial perspectives. In this paper, we propose SkyVLaM, a multimodal large language model for UAV video understanding. SkyVLaM constructs sparse tokens directly from patch-level video representations through a temporal basis perceiver, regularizes the sparse basis to encourage complementary temporal cues, and adaptively selects a temporally coherent dense segment for high-resolution inspection. The resulting sparse and dense tokens are jointly processed by a large language model for query-conditioned segmentation. We further build SkyVid, consisting of SkyVid-VGCG and SkyVid-RVOS for video grounded conversation generation and referring video object segmentation, respectively. SkyVid contains 101 videos, 33.6K frames, and 1.53M pixel-level object instances. Experiments show that SkyVLaM provides a more effective allocation of the visual token budget and improves language-conditioned video segmentation in UAV scenarios.

Remote sensing vision-language models are increasingly expected to support open-ended reasoning over Earth Observation data and a variety of tasks. Most recent progress in this area has been driven by remote-sensing-specific architectural designs, often introducing new encoders, alignment modules, or task-specific fusion mechanisms. In this work, we challenge the necessity of such architectural specialization. We show that a generally capable vision-language model can achieve competitive or state-of-the-art performance at challenging remote sensing benchmarks, provided that it is trained at sufficient scale across diverse data and tasks. Our model uses a single language policy that can either answer directly in text or invoke a localization tool for segmentation and grounding. To train this heterogeneous behaviour, we employ a multi-task reinforcement learning framework with adaptive task rewards covering multiple-choice VQA, free-form VQA, captioning, detection, and segmentation across a large variety of input types. Our approach achieves competitive results across a broad set of benchmarks, including high-resolution, multi-temporal, multi-modal and multi-view tasks. Further, as training data scales, our experiments show consistent improvements across most tasks both in and out of distribution, which correlate with per-task data diversity. These findings suggest that, for remote sensing VLMs, data scale is more important than architectural novelty.

Remote sensing offers an unparalleled vantage point for observing the Earth's long-term surface evolution, yet it demands that a model not only perceive land cover at isolated moments, but also track changes, memorize evolution histories, and reason across time and space. However, existing studies lack a systematic evaluation that dissects these distinct competencies. To fill this gap, we introduce ChronoBench, a multidimensional benchmark that decomposes this task into four progressive cognitive levels (i.e., Land Cover Perception, Temporal Recognition, Long-Term Memory, and Spatio-Temporal Reasoning). The ChronoBench comprises 12 sub-tasks and 17,689 rigorously validated QA (Question-Answer) pairs. Extensive evaluations reveal that mainstream MLLMs fall drastically behind human experts, with Long-Term Memory emerging as the most critical bottleneck. Motivated by this finding, we further propose GeoChrono, an MLLM with enhanced capabilities for tracing, memorizing, and reasoning about long-term geographic evolution. Leveraging the physical prior that geographic parcels remain spatially fixed while their semantics evolve, we design a Temporal Trajectory Encoder~(TempEnc) that constructs per-location temporal trajectories for dedicated land cover evolution modeling, and we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine Token Compressor~(C2FComp) that adaptively preserves dynamic regions while compressing the static background. To support training, we also construct ChronoInstruct, a 104K-sample instruction-tuning dataset spanning all competency levels for training. GeoChrono achieves state-of-the-art performance on ChronoBench, surpassing the leading commercial MLLMs by over 20%, while C2FComp reduces visual tokens by over 56% while retaining GeoChrono's 94.6% performance. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/IntelliSensing/GeoChrono

Multi-label classification assigns several co-occurring labels to each aerial scene, yet deployed models often encounter data distributions different from their training. Feature-statistics augmentation such as MixStyle, EFDMix, and correlated style uncertainty improves generalization at low cost but perturbs channel statistics globally, treating each image as a single style; one class can then contaminate the augmentation of another. Domain generalization is understudied for multi-label remote sensing; no prior method or multi-source benchmark targets it. A label-decoupled augmentation framework is therefore proposed, confining style perturbation to label-specific regions. Per-label attention, obtained from a learnable module or from gradient class-activation maps, yields per-label feature statistics; these statistics are mixed with cross-domain samples that share present labels, under independent per-label coefficients, and features are recomposed by attention-weighted normalization. Three operators combined with two attention sources produce six variants, evaluated on a leave-one-domain-out benchmark from multi-label UCM, AID, and DFC15 over six shared labels. Averaged over three splits and five seeds, the best variant attains 71.5% mean average precision, exceeding empirical risk minimization by 5.0 points and the strongest global-statistics baseline by 1.3 points, with the largest gain on the hardest transfer (up to 7.7 points). Ablations indicate that spatial attention and refreshed localization maps are most influential. The framework adds at most 0.35% parameters, leaves inference unchanged, and appears to offer a generic, inexpensive upgrade path for multi-label statistics-based domain generalization. Code is available upon acceptance at https://github.com/Alaa-Almouradi/Style-Augmentation-Upgrade.

Beyond perception, reasoning is essential in remote sensing for advanced interpretation, inference, and decision-making. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled tool-augmented agents that leverage external tools to perform complex analytical tasks. However, existing studies in remote sensing primarily focus on perception-oriented tasks, leaving cognitive geospatial reasoning largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce TerraLogic, a benchmark for geospatial reasoning. TerraLogic comprises 545 scenario-driven, hierarchy-aware tasks, such as hazard vulnerability assessment, urban heat island analysis, and forest fragmentation dynamics, spanning optical, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and infrared (IR) imagery. It advances evaluation beyond recognition and monitoring toward cognitive-level geospatial analysis. To facilitate evaluation on TerraLogic, we further propose HieraPlan, a tool-augmented agent that organizes toolkits into functional hierarchies and performs fault-tolerant reasoning. HieraPlan enables structured abstraction, robust recovery from tool failures, and stable long-horizon planning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that current approaches struggle with hierarchical geospatial reasoning, while HieraPlan provides a strong baseline with improved reasoning, cross-modal generalization, and error handling. The dataset and agent code are publicly available at https://github.com/Ireliya/TerraLogic.

Although self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising way to reduce annotation effort in close-range remote sensing, its effectiveness for high-resolution multispectral unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery remains underexplored due to limited data. This study evaluated SSL pretraining for precision agriculture using cm-scale multispectral drone imagery collected across multiple sensors, years, and regions. Transformer-based encoders were pretrained with Momentum Contrast v3 (MoCo-v3) and Masked Autoencoders on a harmonized dataset combining msuav500K with newly collected multi-year UAV imagery from agricultural fields in Finland. Pretraining used four spectral bands (Green, Red, Red-Edge, Near-Infrared) for cross-sensor compatibility. The models were evaluated on crop-weed semantic segmentation using the WeedMap dataset with 5--100% training data. The following two subsets served as downstream tasks: Task A (Germany, RedEdge-M), where all pretrained models were compared under partial and full fine-tuning, and Task B (Switzerland, Sequoia), where the best encoder from Task A was assessed. Our Swin Transformer pretrained with MoCo-v3 achieved the strongest performance on both tasks, surpassing the Swin Transformer model of Doornbos et al. pretrained on a pre-release of msuav500K. Our pretrained Swin Transformer further demonstrated cross-sensor and cross-region generalization. We additionally provide a public multi-year multispectral UAV dataset from Finland to support future research.

Ultra-High-Resolution (UHR) remote sensing image understanding requires Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to capture both the global scene layout and sparse yet task-critical local details under limited computational budgets. Existing methods mainly follow two paradigms. One is passive perception, which relies on resolution expansion or token compression and may therefore discard fine-grained details. The other is active perception, which depends on multi-round zooming and search, but suffers from high latency, contextual fragmentation, and error accumulation. We argue that a more effective path toward UHR understanding lies not in accessing more, but in organizing better. To this end, we propose WeaveEarth, a training-free framework that reformulates UHR understanding as a problem of structured evidence construction and reasoning under global context constraints. Specifically, WeaveEarth first employs Global-Aware Evidence Construction to select a compact, low-redundancy, and spatially complementary Minimal Support Evidence Set. It then introduces Structured Evidence Reasoning, which weaves local evidence, spatial metadata, and relative topology into a unified reasoning interface, thereby enhancing the VLM's ability to perform global-local joint reasoning. Extensive experiments show that WeaveEarth consistently outperforms strong baselines and existing UHR methods across multiple UHR remote sensing benchmarks and multiple frozen VLM backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/XianZhi-Ma/WeaveEarth.

The deployment of large-scale foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3), promises a transition toward open-vocabulary, training-free computer vision. However, their capacity to generalize out-of-distribution to the complex, top-down geometric structures of Earth Observation imagery remains largely unquantified. Driven by SAM 3's performance disparities in highly specialized domains, we present a comprehensive, multi-task empirical evaluation across remote sensing scene classification, object detection, and instance segmentation under strict zero-shot and one-shot constraints. To achieve this, we introduce a structural adaptation of SAM 3 by repurposing its decoupled binary presence head into a standalone zero-shot classifier. Furthermore, by systematically isolating textual and visual prompt modalities across five configurations, we explicitly diagnose the alignment mechanics within the model's multimodal decoder. Our findings reveal severe cross-modal interference: while visual prompts successfully align the decoder to complex remote sensing geometry, textual prompts inject misaligned, ground-level semantic bias, actively degrading coordinate regression. To benchmark these capabilities without resource-intensive training, we formulate a novel training-free proxy evaluation protocol for Generalized Zero-Shot tasks (scene classification and instance segmentation). Ultimately, our results demonstrate that SAM 3 avoids the overfitting commonly seen in legacy domain-adapted models, achieving high Harmonic Mean scores in segmentation tasks. However, it remains fundamentally constrained by sub-pixel resolution limits and overhead semantic blind spots, charting a definitive mandate for parameter-efficient geospatial fine-tuning of its multimodal decoder.

The core challenge of heterogeneous change detection in remote sensing imagery lies in effectively decoupling genuine land-cover changes from significant modal disparities caused by distinct imaging mechanisms. These intrinsic inconsistencies are prone to introducing pseudo-changes, thereby constraining detection accuracy. To address this, we propose a novel, end-to-end adversarial spatio-frequency refinement network (ASFR-Net). Initially, a modality-invariant representation learner (MIR-Learner) guides the backbone to extract modality-invariant features, effectively bridging the primary domain gap. Subsequently, to address persistent residual modal differences, we design an innovative spatio-frequency synergistic enhancement module (SFEM), which identifies and suppresses sensor-specific noise and artifacts that are difficult to discern in the spatial domain by leveraging frequency-domain processing. Multi-level difference features are then computed from these refined representations and fed into a decoder equipped with cascaded hierarchical guided fusion module (HGFM) blocks to generate precise change maps. To alleviate the data scarcity in heterogeneous tasks, we construct and release a new high-resolution benchmark specifically focused on building changes: the visible-near-infrared heterogeneous change detection (VisNIR-HCD) dataset. It presents unique scientific challenges arising from deceptive visual similarity and non-linear spectral inversions, providing a robust platform for evaluating model generalization. Extensive experiments on VisNIR-HCD and public datasets demonstrate that ASFR-Net achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, significantly outperforming existing methods. The source code and the VisNIR-HCD dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/LuoYang2024/ASFR-Net.

Infrared remote-sensing imagery captures intensity structure, object-background contrast, and illumination-invariant cues often invisible in RGB imagery. Yet, most remote-sensing vision-language resources and models focus on visible-band semantics, leaving infrared vision-language understanding underexplored. We introduce MonoIR-RS, a large-scale infrared remote-sensing vision-language dataset and benchmark that couples IR-aware data construction with CLIP-style contrastive adaptation and VLM instruction tuning. Built from the same source pool and split as FusionRS, MonoIR-RS retains the infrared image as the model-facing modality, yielding 600,000 synthesized infrared images and 59,032 retained IR-aware caption records. The model experiments use this retained language-supervision subset, whose captions rewrite supervision around grayscale structure and infrared-style contrast instead of RGB appearance. We show that the synthesized infrared imagery is markedly closer to real thermal imagery than a grayscale conversion on the AVIID benchmark. We fine-tune five CLIP backbones and six VLM backbones, and calibrate them against zero-shot behavior: IR-aware adaptation lifts CLIP mean recall by up to 12.8 points and drives VLM captioning IR-cue coverage to 100% while reducing residual RGB-color leakage to near zero. By isolating the infrared modality from RGB-IR dual-modal learning, MonoIR-RS offers a controlled, reproducible testbed for aligning infrared remote-sensing evidence with language.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed on infrared (IR) remote sensing imagery in security-critical settings, yet their adversarial robustness remains unexamined. We present AirflowAttack, to our knowledge the first adversarial attack for IR remote-sensing VLMs and the first to weaponize thermal-airflow turbulence as the perturbation prior. A lightweight generator synthesizes a single input-agnostic perturbation regularized toward physically plausible airflow patterns. Optimized on one surrogate CLIP model, it attains a mean zero-shot scene-classification attack success rate (ASR, the fraction of samples whose top-1 class changes) of 48.5% across five diverse CLIP backbones, far exceeding four IR-specific physical baselines (27.7--37.0%). Applied to six state-of-the-art VLMs, it cuts scene-classification accuracy by up to 38.2% relative, yet paradoxically makes some models more confident in their IR analysis, confabulating the perturbation as genuine thermal evidence such as temperature gradients and convection. Ablations show the airflow prior raises physical plausibility at no measurable cost to attack success. Together with a benchmark spanning eleven models and four tasks, these findings expose critical vulnerabilities in the rapidly expanding IR VLM ecosystem.

Binary change detection in remote sensing requires both complete changed-region localization and accurate boundary delineation. We present MambaRefine-CD, a region-boundary temporal refinement framework built on a shared MambaVision encoder. The proposed D-RBI module constructs temporal evidence from paired features, absolute differences, and signed differences, then separates it into region and Sobel-conditioned boundary streams. Region features are enhanced with CRAM-lite and decoded by an adaptive receptive-field FPN, while the finest boundary stream guides a bounded residual refinement of the coarse prediction. Experiments on DSIFN-CD and WHU-CD show strong changed-class F1 and IoU under verified evaluation settings, and ablations support the contribution of signed temporal evidence and the full region-boundary refinement pipeline.

Existing Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Image (ORSI-SOD) methods mainly adopt the static inference strategy, which uses fixed trained model parameters for saliency inference in the testing phase. This means that even if the generated saliency map has errors, it cannot be further optimized. In this paper, we propose the novel IPDiff, a Diffusion-driven ORSI-SOD method with Information Reconstruction and Multi-Prior Guidance. We build IPDiff based on a unique dynamic optimization strategy, which endows IPDiff with the ability to iteratively optimize saliency maps with a dynamic parameter. Specifically, we formulate ORSI-SOD as a conditional diffusion problem in IPDiff. IPDiff first extracts informative conditional priors from ORSIs, including the saliency prior and the hierarchical priors, in the prior network with the assistance of the information reconstruction-driven attention module. The saliency prior can provide positional information of salient objects, while the hierarchical priors can provide specific detail and semantic information of salient objects. Under the guidance of these priors, IPDiff then iteratively denoises random noise as the timestep dynamically changes in the denoising network, generating saliency maps that are close to ground truths. Notably, we simultaneously supervise IPDiff in both spatial and spectral domains through a hybrid loss function to achieve efficient network training. Comprehensive experiments on public ORSSD, EORSSD, and ORSI-4199 datasets demonstrate that our proposed IPDiff achieves the best performance compared to 46 state-of-the-art methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/MathLee/IPDiff.

Decades of orbital missions have produced multi-modal remote sensing data for the Moon, spanning optical imagery, spectroscopy, thermal emission, radar, gravity, and elemental composition. Yet these datasets remain fragmented across archives, and no benchmark exists for evaluating machine learning on lunar data. We introduce Moonstone, the first multi-modal foundation model benchmark for lunar remote sensing. Our contributions are: (1) a 28-channel, 128 pixels-per-degree (~237 m) global lunar pretraining dataset from seven instrument families across five missions, (2) MG-MAE, a modality-grouped masked autoencoder with per-group convolutional tokenizers, a shared Vision Transformer encoder, attention masking for missing modalities, coverage-adaptive masking for heterogeneous spatial coverage, and spectral continuity regularization for physically plausible reconstructions, and (3) a benchmark of six downstream tasks covering classification, regression, and segmentation. MG-MAE pretrained features outperform scratch baselines on all tasks and surpass both ImageNet-pretrained and vanilla MAE baselines by large margins. Data and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ayushprd/Moonstone and https://github.com/ayushprd/Moonstone .

Remote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) generates natural-language descriptions of semantic changes between paired remote sensing images (RSIs), supporting applications such as urban planning, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. Although recent methods achieve strong captioning accuracy, most overlook computational efficiency and inference speed, which are essential for real-time deployment in practice. To this end, we propose LBTCap, a lightweight RSICC framework built on a bilateral Transformer that jointly models pre- and post-change features for efficient processing of paired RSIs. Specifically, we introduce a bilateral attention mechanism for paired inputs: the two temporal images are projected into separate queries and keys by the same query and key matrices shared across the two images, the value is formed from their concatenation, and the two resulting attention maps are combined by a learnable, structurally bilateral weighting instead of a fixed subtraction. This design keeps both temporal branches explicit while remaining compact, and, together with a truncated backbone and grouped-query attention, LBTCap uses only 39.99M parameters, of which the change-aware encoder accounts for just 2.78M. Extensive experiments on two public RSICC datasets show that LBTCap matches or closely approaches the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods while using far fewer parameters and running at markedly higher inference speed, with the benefit of the bilateral formulation most pronounced in the low-resource setting, demonstrating a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off for practical RSICC.

Cloud removal (CR) is essential for optical remote sensing, serving as a prerequisite for reliable downstream interpretation, such as semantic segmentation and change detection. However, existing CR approaches often prioritize visual realism while overlooking their impact on subsequent analytical tasks, leading to semantic drift and degraded downstream performance. To address this issue, we propose Geo-Anchored Cloud Removal (GACR), a unified framework that jointly ensures faithful reconstruction and robust interpretability. At its core, GACR incorporates Observation-Anchored Residual Flow (OAR-Flow), which reformulates CR as a physically grounded residual inversion process. By anchoring the generative trajectory to the cloudy observation rather than pure noise, OAR-Flow enables fast, stable, and faithful reconstruction. To further preserve semantic structures critical for downstream interpretation, GACR integrates Geo-Contextual Prior Alignment (GCPA) to constrain the reconstruction within a semantic manifold induced by a Vision Foundation Model (VFM). Consequently, GACR strictly maintains the spatial-semantic integrity of complex landscapes. Extensive experiments across six CR datasets and twelve downstream tasks demonstrate that GACR produces superior reconstruction quality while consistently improving downstream task accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/wzy6055/GACR.

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong cross-modal understanding and coordinate generation abilities in visual grounding. However, transferring these abilities to remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) remains challenging. High-resolution remote sensing images usually cover large-scale scenes, where targets are often extremely small and surrounded by numerous visually similar distractors. Meanwhile, queries often contain multiple clues, such as reference objects, spatial relations, and target attributes. Existing MLLM-based methods usually formulate RSVG as one-step coordinate generation, which may lead to unstable predictions for small-object localization and complex queries. To address these challenges, we propose GeoSearcher, which reformulates RSVG as an anchor-guided progressive reasoning process and realizes it through two coupled stages: Anchor-Centric Reasoning Supervised Fine-Tuning (ACR-SFT) and Process-Faithful Group Relative Policy Optimization (PF-GRPO). In ACR-SFT, anchor-centric reasoning data are used to teach the model to represent key visual clues as anchors and progressively integrate location, relational, and attribute clues around them. In PF-GRPO, Process-Aware Reward (PAR) and Reasoning-Informative Sample Selector (RISS) further optimize this reasoning behavior by jointly evaluating key reasoning steps and target localization, while focusing training on samples that are more beneficial for improving progressive reasoning. Through this design, GeoSearcher transforms large-scale visual search into a more constrained local reasoning process. Extensive experiments on DIOR-RSVG, OPT-RSVG, and VRS-Bench show that GeoSearcher outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The project will be released at https://github.com/wangdianyu954-xixi/GeoSearcher.

Remote sensing change detection (CD) traditionally focuses on pixel-level binary segmentation, which identifies where changes occur but neither what nor why. To bridge this semantic gap, we introduce JL1-CC&QA, a multi-task benchmark that extends the JL1-CD dataset with two complementary annotation layers: change captioning (CC) and change question answering (QA). Built upon 5,000 bi-temporal image pairs acquired by the Jilin-1 satellite at 0.5-0.75m ground sample distance, the benchmark comprises: (i) JL1-CC, providing 17,021 quality-verified captions that describe diverse land-cover transformations; and (ii) JL1-QA, offering 20,060 question-answer pairs across eight question types, enabling fine-grained, interactive interrogation of surface changes. All annotations are produced via a three-stage pipeline consisting of multi-modal large language model (LLM) generation, vision-grounded LLM judging, and human expert verification. We hope that JL1-CC&QA, as a benchmark unifying binary change masks, change captions, and change-oriented QA over the same image set, will serve as a valuable resource for the community to advance multi-task change understanding in remote sensing. The dataset is available at https://github.com/circleLZY/JL1-CD.

Few-shot segmentation asks a model to delineate a target class in a query image from only a handful of annotated examples, a setting most acute in remote sensing, where labels are scarce and the imagery departs sharply from the natural images on which vision backbones are pretrained. Prevailing approaches either train a segmenter on labelled episodes, which raises accuracy within the training distribution but binds the model to it, or reduce each class to a lossy summary of frozen features, a single prototype, a few cluster prototypes, or a discrete clustering, none of which preserves the internal structure of a multimodal class. We argue that a class is better described by a distribution than by a point, and that frozen self-supervised features already carry enough structure to estimate that distribution directly. We introduce FROST, a training-free few-shot segmenter that treats the reference foreground and background as two point clouds on the unit sphere of frozen DINOv3 features and labels each query token by a nonparametric density ratio, with a threshold the Bayes rule fixes at zero under equal priors. Because the variance of a density estimate shrinks as its sample grows, the decision sharpens as references accumulate, and every remaining quantity from the kernel bandwidth to the spatial gate is read from the support set rather than tuned. We develop FROST for overhead imagery, where a class is typically a scatter of many small and dissimilar instances that a density tracks but a lossy summary blurs. Across seventeen remote-sensing benchmarks FROST surpasses both training-free and learning-based methods, leading by 5.6 mIoU from a single annotated example and widening its lead as the support set grows, all while remaining among the smallest models compared. Code is available at https://github.com/jhpark-ai/FROST.

Generative models have achieved remarkable progress, yet applying them to satellite imagery remains challenging. Unlike natural imagery, satellite scenes are structured by spatially complex and semantically distinct geometries. Prior work addresses this complexity by adapting natural image frameworks using dense rasters or sparse prompts, trading off annotation cost and fidelity while breaking compatibility with vector primitives commonly used to represent geographic information. We introduce TerraDiT-$Ω$, a unified spatial control framework that generates satellite imagery directly from any native geospatial primitive. By jointly leveraging precise annotations (polygons, polylines) and coarser ones (bounding boxes, points), the model supports controllable layouts across varying annotation budgets, broadening applicability to design tasks such as urban planning while remaining naturally compatible with end-to-end GeoAI workflows. To effectively leverage these primitives during generation, we propose Geometry-Aware Local Attention, a conditioning mechanism that injects explicit geometric cues into the attention space. Across all conditioning formats, our approach consistently outperforms both dense-control and sparse-control baselines. Furthermore, this flexibility enables controllable synthetic data augmentation using a single generative model, improving downstream performance on land-cover segmentation, object detection, road graph extraction, and scene classification. Code, data, and weights are available at https://github.com/mvrl/TerraDiT.