arXiv subjects

Naoto Yokoya

Publications and source records attributed to Naoto Yokoya.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Direction-aware 3D Large Multimodal Models

3D large multimodal models (3D LMMs) rely heavily on ego poses for enabling directional question-answering and spatial reasoning. However, most existing point cloud benchmarks contain rich directional queries but lack the corresponding ego poses, making them inherently ill-posed in 3D large multimodal modelling. In this work, we redefine a new and rigorous paradigm that enables direction-aware 3D LMMs by identifying and supplementing ego poses into point cloud benchmarks and transforming the corresponding point cloud data according to the identified ego poses. We enable direction-aware 3D LMMs with two novel designs. The first is PoseRecover, a fully automatic pose recovery pipeline that matches questions with ego poses from RGB-D video extrinsics via object-frustum intersection and visibility check with Z-buffers. The second is PoseAlign that transforms the point cloud data to be aligned with the identified ego poses instead of either injecting ego poses into textual prompts or introducing pose-encoded features in the projection layers. Extensive experiments show that our designs yield consistent improvements across multiple 3D LMM backbones such as LL3DA, LL3DA-SONATA, Chat-Scene, and 3D-LLAVA, improving ScanRefer mIoU by 30.0% and Scan2Cap LLM-as-judge accuracy by 11.7%. In addition, our approach is simple, generic, and training-efficient, requiring only instruction tuning while establishing a strong baseline for direction-aware 3D-LMMs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Enhancing 3D LiDAR Segmentation by Shaping Dense and Accurate 2D Semantic Predictions

Semantic segmentation of 3D LiDAR point clouds is important in urban remote sensing for understanding real-world street environments. This task, by projecting LiDAR point clouds and 3D semantic labels as sparse maps, can be reformulated as a 2D problem. However, the intrinsic sparsity of the projected LiDAR and label maps can result in sparse and inaccurate intermediate 2D semantic predictions, which in return limits the final 3D accuracy. To address this issue, we enhance this task by shaping dense and accurate 2D predictions. Specifically, we develop a multi-modal segmentation model, MM2D3D. By leveraging camera images as auxiliary data, we introduce cross-modal guided filtering to overcome label map sparsity by constraining intermediate 2D semantic predictions with dense semantic relations derived from the camera images; and we introduce dynamic cross pseudo supervision to overcome LiDAR map sparsity by encouraging the 2D predictions to emulate the dense distribution of the semantic predictions from the camera images. Experiments show that our techniques enable our model to achieve intermediate 2D semantic predictions with dense distribution and higher accuracy, which effectively enhances the final 3D accuracy. Comparisons with previous methods demonstrate our superior performance in both 2D and 3D spaces.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Hyperspectral Imaging

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is an advanced sensing modality that simultaneously captures spatial and spectral information, enabling non-invasive, label-free analysis of material, chemical, and biological properties. This Primer presents a comprehensive overview of HSI, from the underlying physical principles and sensor architectures to key steps in data acquisition, calibration, and correction. We summarize common data structures and highlight classical and modern analysis methods, including dimensionality reduction, classification, spectral unmixing, and AI-driven techniques such as deep learning. Representative applications across Earth observation, precision agriculture, biomedicine, industrial inspection, cultural heritage, and security are also discussed, emphasizing HSI's ability to uncover sub-visual features for advanced monitoring, diagnostics, and decision-making. Persistent challenges, such as hardware trade-offs, acquisition variability, and the complexity of high-dimensional data, are examined alongside emerging solutions, including computational imaging, physics-informed modeling, cross-modal fusion, and self-supervised learning. Best practices for dataset sharing, reproducibility, and metadata documentation are further highlighted to support transparency and reuse. Looking ahead, we explore future directions toward scalable, real-time, and embedded HSI systems, driven by sensor miniaturization, self-supervised learning, and foundation models. As HSI evolves into a general-purpose, cross-disciplinary platform, it holds promise for transformative applications in science, technology, and society.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Experience-Driven Multi-Agent Systems Are Training-free Context-aware Earth Observers

Recent advances have enabled large language model (LLM) agents to solve complex tasks by orchestrating external tools. However, these agents often struggle in specialized, tool-intensive domains that demand long-horizon execution, tight coordination across modalities, and strict adherence to implicit tool constraints. Earth Observation (EO) tasks exemplify this challenge due to the multi-modal and multi-temporal data inputs, as well as the requirements of geo-knowledge constraints (spectrum library, spatial reasoning, etc): many high-level plans can be derailed by subtle execution errors that propagate through a pipeline and invalidate final results. A core difficulty is that existing agents lack a mechanism to learn fine-grained, tool-level expertise from interaction. Without such expertise, they cannot reliably configure tool parameters or recover from mid-execution failures, limiting their effectiveness in complex EO workflows. To address this, we introduce \textbf{GeoEvolver}, a self-evolving multi-agent system~(MAS) that enables LLM agents to acquire EO expertise through structured interaction without any parameter updates. GeoEvolver decomposes each query into independent sub-goals via a retrieval-augmented multi-agent orchestrator, then explores diverse tool-parameter configurations at the sub-goal level. Successful patterns and root-cause attribution from failures are then distilled in an evolving memory bank that provides in-context demonstrations for future queries. Experiments on three tool-integrated EO benchmarks show that GeoEvolver consistently improves end-to-end task success, with an average gain of 12\% across multiple LLM backbones, demonstrating that EO expertise can emerge progressively from efficient, fine-grained interactions with the environment.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

The Confidence Dichotomy: Analyzing and Mitigating Miscalibration in Tool-Use Agents

Autonomous agents based on large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving to handle multi-turn tasks, but ensuring their trustworthiness remains a critical challenge. A fundamental pillar of this trustworthiness is calibration, which refers to an agent's ability to express confidence that reliably reflects its actual performance. While calibration is well-established for static models, its dynamics in tool-integrated agentic workflows remain underexplored. In this work, we systematically investigate verbalized calibration in tool-use agents, revealing a fundamental confidence dichotomy driven by tool type. Specifically, our pilot study identifies that evidence tools (e.g., web search) systematically induce severe overconfidence due to inherent noise in retrieved information, while verification tools (e.g., code interpreters) can ground reasoning through deterministic feedback and mitigate miscalibration. To robustly improve calibration across tool types, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning framework that jointly optimizes task accuracy and calibration, supported by a holistic benchmark of reward designs. We demonstrate that our trained agents not only achieve superior calibration but also exhibit robust generalization from local training environments to noisy web settings and to distinct domains such as mathematical reasoning. Our results highlight the necessity of domain-specific calibration strategies for tool-use agents. More broadly, this work establishes a foundation for building self-aware agents that can reliably communicate uncertainty in high-stakes, real-world deployments.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

MP-HSIR: A Multi-Prompt Framework for Universal Hyperspectral Image Restoration

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) often suffer from diverse and unknown degradations during imaging, leading to severe spectral and spatial distortions. Existing HSI restoration methods typically rely on specific degradation assumptions, limiting their effectiveness in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose \textbf{MP-HSIR}, a novel multi-prompt framework that effectively integrates spectral, textual, and visual prompts to achieve universal HSI restoration across diverse degradation types and intensities. Specifically, we develop a prompt-guided spatial-spectral transformer, which incorporates spatial self-attention and a prompt-guided dual-branch spectral self-attention. Since degradations affect spectral features differently, we introduce spectral prompts in the local spectral branch to provide universal low-rank spectral patterns as prior knowledge for enhancing spectral reconstruction. Furthermore, the text-visual synergistic prompt fuses high-level semantic representations with fine-grained visual features to encode degradation information, thereby guiding the restoration process. Extensive experiments on 9 HSI restoration tasks, including all-in-one scenarios, generalization tests, and real-world cases, demonstrate that MP-HSIR not only consistently outperforms existing all-in-one methods but also surpasses state-of-the-art task-specific approaches across multiple tasks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/ZhehuiWu/MP-HSIR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Geo3DVQA: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for 3D Geospatial Reasoning from Aerial Imagery

Three-dimensional geospatial analysis is critical for applications in urban planning, climate adaptation, and environmental assessment. However, current methodologies depend on costly, specialized sensors, such as LiDAR and multispectral sensors, which restrict global accessibility. Additionally, existing sensor-based and rule-driven methods struggle with tasks requiring the integration of multiple 3D cues, handling diverse queries, and providing interpretable reasoning. We present Geo3DVQA, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates vision-language models (VLMs) in height-aware 3D geospatial reasoning from RGB imagery alone. Unlike conventional sensor-based frameworks, Geo3DVQA emphasizes realistic scenarios integrating elevation, sky view factors, and land cover patterns. The benchmark comprises 110k curated question-answer pairs across 16 task categories, including single-feature inference, multi-feature reasoning, and application-level analysis. Through a systematic evaluation of ten state-of-the-art VLMs, we reveal fundamental limitations in RGB-to-3D spatial reasoning. Our results further show that domain-specific instruction tuning consistently enhances model performance across all task categories, including height-aware and open-ended, application-oriented reasoning. Geo3DVQA provides a unified, interpretable framework for evaluating RGB-based 3D geospatial reasoning and identifies key challenges and opportunities for scalable 3D spatial analysis. The code and data are available at https://github.com/mm1129/Geo3DVQA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Monocular Height Estimation via Sparse LiDAR-Guided Correction

Monocular height estimation (MHE) from very-high-resolution (VHR) optical imagery remains challenging due to limited structural cues and the high cost and geographic constraints of conventional elevation data such as airborne LiDAR and multi-view stereo. Although recent MHE and monocular depth estimation (MDE) models show strong performance, their robustness under varied illumination and scene conditions is still limited. We introduce a fully automated correction pipeline that integrates sparse, imperfect global LiDAR measurements from ICESat-2 with deep learning predictions to enhance accuracy and stability. The workflow relies entirely on publicly available models and data and requires only a single georeferenced optical image to produce corrected height maps, enabling low-cost and globally scalable deployment. We also establish the first benchmark for this task, evaluating two random forest based approaches, four parameter efficient fine tuning methods, and full fine tuning. Experiments across six diverse regions at 0.5 m resolution (297 km2), covering the urban cores of Tokyo, Paris, and Sao Paulo as well as suburban and forested areas, show substantial gains. The best method reduces the MHE model's mean absolute error (MAE) by 30.9 percent and improves its F1HE score by 44.2 percent. For the MDE model, MAE improves by 24.1 percent and the F1HE score by 25.1 percent. These results validate the effectiveness of our correction pipeline and demonstrate how sparse global LiDAR can systematically strengthen both MHE and MDE models, enabling scalable and widely accessible 3D height mapping.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

DynamicVL: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Dynamic City Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding, but their application to long-term Earth observation analysis remains limited, primarily focusing on single-temporal or bi-temporal imagery. To address this gap, we introduce DVL-Suite, a comprehensive framework for analyzing long-term urban dynamics through remote sensing imagery. Our suite comprises 14,871 high-resolution (1.0m) multi-temporal images spanning 42 major cities in the U.S. from 2005 to 2023, organized into two components: DVL-Bench and DVL-Instruct. The DVL-Bench includes six urban understanding tasks, from fundamental change detection (pixel-level) to quantitative analyses (regional-level) and comprehensive urban narratives (scene-level), capturing diverse urban dynamics including expansion/transformation patterns, disaster assessment, and environmental challenges. We evaluate 18 state-of-the-art MLLMs and reveal their limitations in long-term temporal understanding and quantitative analysis. These challenges motivate the creation of DVL-Instruct, a specialized instruction-tuning dataset designed to enhance models' capabilities in multi-temporal Earth observation. Building upon this dataset, we develop DVLChat, a baseline model capable of both image-level question-answering and pixel-level segmentation, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of city dynamics through language interactions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

DisasterM3: A Remote Sensing Vision-Language Dataset for Disaster Damage Assessment and Response

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have made great achievements in Earth vision. However, complex disaster scenes with diverse disaster types, geographic regions, and satellite sensors have posed new challenges for VLM applications. To fill this gap, we curate a remote sensing vision-language dataset (DisasterM3) for global-scale disaster assessment and response. DisasterM3 includes 26,988 bi-temporal satellite images and 123k instruction pairs across 5 continents, with three characteristics: 1) Multi-hazard: DisasterM3 involves 36 historical disaster events with significant impacts, which are categorized into 10 common natural and man-made disasters. 2)Multi-sensor: Extreme weather during disasters often hinders optical sensor imaging, making it necessary to combine Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery for post-disaster scenes. 3) Multi-task: Based on real-world scenarios, DisasterM3 includes 9 disaster-related visual perception and reasoning tasks, harnessing the full potential of VLM's reasoning ability with progressing from disaster-bearing body recognition to structural damage assessment and object relational reasoning, culminating in the generation of long-form disaster reports. We extensively evaluated 14 generic and remote sensing VLMs on our benchmark, revealing that state-of-the-art models struggle with the disaster tasks, largely due to the lack of a disaster-specific corpus, cross-sensor gap, and damage object counting insensitivity. Focusing on these issues, we fine-tune four VLMs using our dataset and achieve stable improvements across all tasks, with robust cross-sensor and cross-disaster generalization capabilities. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/Junjue-Wang/DisasterM3.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

BRIGHT: A globally distributed multimodal building damage assessment dataset with very-high-resolution for all-weather disaster response

Disaster events occur around the world and cause significant damage to human life and property. Earth observation (EO) data enables rapid and comprehensive building damage assessment (BDA), an essential capability in the aftermath of a disaster to reduce human casualties and to inform disaster relief efforts. Recent research focuses on the development of AI models to achieve accurate mapping of unseen disaster events, mostly using optical EO data. However, solutions based on optical data are limited to clear skies and daylight hours, preventing a prompt response to disasters. Integrating multimodal (MM) EO data, particularly the combination of optical and SAR imagery, makes it possible to provide all-weather, day-and-night disaster responses. Despite this potential, the development of robust multimodal AI models has been constrained by the lack of suitable benchmark datasets. In this paper, we present a BDA dataset using veRy-hIGH-resoluTion optical and SAR imagery (BRIGHT) to support AI-based all-weather disaster response. To the best of our knowledge, BRIGHT is the first open-access, globally distributed, event-diverse MM dataset specifically curated to support AI-based disaster response. It covers five types of natural disasters and two types of man-made disasters across 14 regions worldwide, with a particular focus on developing countries where external assistance is most needed. The optical and SAR imagery in BRIGHT, with a spatial resolution between 0.3-1 meters, provides detailed representations of individual buildings, making it ideal for precise BDA. In our experiments, we have tested seven advanced AI models trained with our BRIGHT to validate the transferability and robustness. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ChenHongruixuan/BRIGHT. BRIGHT also serves as the official dataset for the 2025 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

CrossEarth: Geospatial Vision Foundation Model for Domain Generalizable Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

The field of Remote Sensing Domain Generalization (RSDG) has emerged as a critical and valuable research frontier, focusing on developing models that generalize effectively across diverse scenarios. Despite the substantial domain gaps in RS images that are characterized by variabilities such as location, wavelength, and sensor type, research in this area remains underexplored: (1) Current cross-domain methods primarily focus on Domain Adaptation (DA), which adapts models to predefined domains rather than to unseen ones; (2) Few studies targeting the RSDG issue, especially for semantic segmentation tasks, where existing models are developed for specific unknown domains, struggling with issues of underfitting on other unknown scenarios; (3) Existing RS foundation models tend to prioritize in-domain performance over cross-domain generalization. To this end, we introduce the first vision foundation model for RSDG semantic segmentation, CrossEarth. CrossEarth demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization through a specially designed data-level Earth-Style Injection pipeline and a model-level Multi-Task Training pipeline. In addition, for the semantic segmentation task, we have curated an RSDG benchmark comprising 32 cross-domain settings across various regions, spectral bands, platforms, and climates, providing a comprehensive framework for testing the generalizability of future RSDG models. Extensive experiments on this benchmark demonstrate the superiority of CrossEarth over existing state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

GaussianOcc: Fully Self-supervised and Efficient 3D Occupancy Estimation with Gaussian Splatting

We introduce GaussianOcc, a systematic method that investigates the two usages of Gaussian splatting for fully self-supervised and efficient 3D occupancy estimation in surround views. First, traditional methods for self-supervised 3D occupancy estimation still require ground truth 6D poses from sensors during training. To address this limitation, we propose Gaussian Splatting for Projection (GSP) module to provide accurate scale information for fully self-supervised training from adjacent view projection. Additionally, existing methods rely on volume rendering for final 3D voxel representation learning using 2D signals (depth maps, semantic maps), which is both time-consuming and less effective. We propose Gaussian Splatting from Voxel space (GSV) to leverage the fast rendering properties of Gaussian splatting. As a result, the proposed GaussianOcc method enables fully self-supervised (no ground truth pose) 3D occupancy estimation in competitive performance with low computational cost (2.7 times faster in training and 5 times faster in rendering). The relevant code is available in https://github.com/GANWANSHUI/GaussianOcc.git.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Foundation Models for Remote Sensing and Earth Observation: A Survey

Remote Sensing (RS) is a crucial technology for observing, monitoring, and interpreting our planet, with broad applications across geoscience, economics, humanitarian fields, etc. While artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning, has achieved significant advances in RS, unique challenges persist in developing more intelligent RS systems, including the complexity of Earth's environments, diverse sensor modalities, distinctive feature patterns, varying spatial and spectral resolutions, and temporal dynamics. Meanwhile, recent breakthroughs in large Foundation Models (FMs) have expanded AI's potential across many domains due to their exceptional generalizability and zero-shot transfer capabilities. However, their success has largely been confined to natural data like images and video, with degraded performance and even failures for RS data of various non-optical modalities. This has inspired growing interest in developing Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs) to address the complex demands of Earth Observation (EO) tasks, spanning the surface, atmosphere, and oceans. This survey systematically reviews the emerging field of RSFMs. It begins with an outline of their motivation and background, followed by an introduction of their foundational concepts. It then categorizes and reviews existing RSFM studies including their datasets and technical contributions across Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), Visual-Language Models (VLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), and beyond. In addition, we benchmark these models against publicly available datasets, discuss existing challenges, and propose future research directions in this rapidly evolving field. A project associated with this survey has been built at https://github.com/xiaoaoran/awesome-RSFMs .

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Seeing is Believing, but How Much? A Comprehensive Analysis of Verbalized Calibration in Vision-Language Models

Uncertainty quantification is essential for assessing the reliability and trustworthiness of modern AI systems. Among existing approaches, verbalized uncertainty, where models express their confidence through natural language, has emerged as a lightweight and interpretable solution in large language models (LLMs). However, its effectiveness in vision-language models (VLMs) remains insufficiently studied. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of verbalized confidence in VLMs, spanning three model categories, four task domains, and three evaluation scenarios. Our results show that current VLMs often display notable miscalibration across diverse tasks and settings. Notably, visual reasoning models (i.e., thinking with images) consistently exhibit better calibration, suggesting that modality-specific reasoning is critical for reliable uncertainty estimation. To further address calibration challenges, we introduce Visual Confidence-Aware Prompting, a two-stage prompting strategy that improves confidence alignment in multimodal settings. Overall, our study highlights the inherent miscalibration in VLMs across modalities. More broadly, our findings underscore the fundamental importance of modality alignment and model faithfulness in advancing reliable multimodal systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A Vision Centric Remote Sensing Benchmark

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in vision-language tasks but their remote sensing (RS) counterpart are relatively under explored. Unlike natural images, RS imagery presents unique challenges that current MLLMs struggle to handle, particularly in visual grounding and spatial reasoning. This study investigates the limitations of CLIP-based MLLMs in RS, highlighting their failure to differentiate visually distinct yet semantically similar RS images. To address this, we introduce a remote sensing multimodal visual patterns (RSMMVP) benchmark. It is designed to evaluate MLLMs in RS tasks by identifying the CLIP-blind pairs, where CLIP-based models incorrectly assign high similarity scores to visually distinct RS images. Through a visual question answering (VQA) evaluation, we analyze the performance of state-of-the-art MLLMs, revealing significant limitations in RS specific representation learning. The results provide valuable insights into the weaknesses of CLIP-based visual encoding and offer a foundation for future research to develop more effective MLLMs tailored for remote sensing applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Joint Super-Resolution and Segmentation for 1-m Impervious Surface Area Mapping in China's Yangtze River Economic Belt

We propose a novel joint framework by integrating super-resolution and segmentation, called JointSeg, which enables the generation of 1-meter ISA maps directly from freely available Sentinel-2 imagery. JointSeg was trained on multimodal cross-resolution inputs, offering a scalable and affordable alternative to traditional approaches. This synergistic design enables gradual resolution enhancement from 10m to 1m while preserving fine-grained spatial textures, and ensures high classification fidelity through effective cross-scale feature fusion. This method has been successfully applied to the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB), a region characterized by complex urban-rural patterns and diverse topography. As a result, a comprehensive ISA mapping product for 2021, referred to as ISA-1, was generated, covering an area of over 2.2 million square kilometers. Quantitative comparisons against the 10m ESA WorldCover and other benchmark products reveal that ISA-1 achieves an F1-score of 85.71%, outperforming bilinear-interpolation-based segmentation by 9.5%, and surpassing other ISA datasets by 21.43%-61.07%. In densely urbanized areas (e.g., Suzhou, Nanjing), ISA-1 reduces ISA overestimation through improved discrimination of green spaces and water bodies. Conversely, in mountainous regions (e.g., Ganzi, Zhaotong), it identifies significantly more ISA due to its enhanced ability to detect fragmented anthropogenic features such as rural roads and sparse settlements, demonstrating its robustness across diverse landscapes. Moreover, we present biennial ISA maps from 2017 to 2023, capturing spatiotemporal urbanization dynamics across representative cities. The results highlight distinct regional growth patterns: rapid expansion in upstream cities, moderate growth in midstream regions, and saturation in downstream metropolitan areas.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SARLANG-1M: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Modeling in SAR Image Understanding

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a crucial remote sensing technology, enabling all-weather, day-and-night observation with strong surface penetration for precise and continuous environmental monitoring and analysis. However, SAR image interpretation remains challenging due to its complex physical imaging mechanisms and significant visual disparities from human perception. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in RGB image understanding, offering powerful open-vocabulary interpretation and flexible language interaction. However, their application to SAR images is severely constrained by the absence of SAR-specific knowledge in their training distributions, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this limitation, we introduce SARLANG-1M, a large-scale benchmark tailored for multimodal SAR image understanding, with a primary focus on integrating SAR with textual modality. SARLANG-1M comprises more than 1 million high-quality SAR image-text pairs collected from over 59 cities worldwide. It features hierarchical resolutions (ranging from 0.1 to 25 meters), fine-grained semantic descriptions (including both concise and detailed captions), diverse remote sensing categories (1,696 object types and 16 land cover classes), and multi-task question-answering pairs spanning seven applications and 1,012 question types. Extensive experiments on mainstream VLMs demonstrate that fine-tuning with SARLANG-1M significantly enhances their performance in SAR image interpretation, reaching performance comparable to human experts. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Jimmyxichen/SARLANG-1M.

cs.CV↗