SAMChat: Introducing Chain of Thought Reasoning and GRPO to a Multimodal Small Language Model for Small Scale Remote Sensing

Abstract

Remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating text-image content have been demonstrated by recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, their effectiveness in specialized domains-particularly those requiring resource-efficient and domain-specific adaptations-has remained limited. In this work, a lightweight multimodal language model termed SAMChat is introduced, specifically adapted to analyze remote sensing imagery in secluded areas, including challenging missile launch sites. A new dataset, SAMData, was compiled by verifying hundreds of aerial images through expert review, and subtle military installations were highlighted via detailed captions. Supervised fine-tuning on a 2B parameter open-source MLLM with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning annotations was performed, enabling more accurate and interpretable explanations. Additionally, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was leveraged to enhance the model's ability to detect critical domain-specific cues-such as defensive layouts and key military structures-while minimizing false positives on civilian scenes. Through empirical evaluations, it has been shown that SAMChat significantly outperforms both larger, general-purpose multimodal models and existing remote sensing adapted approaches on open-ended captioning and classification metrics. Over 80% recall and 98% precision were achieved on the newly proposed SAMData benchmark, underscoring the potency of targeted fine-tuning and reinforcement learning in specialized real-world applications.