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OmniEarth: A Benchmark for Evaluating Vision-Language Models in Geospatial Tasks

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • OmniEarth is a newly introduced benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate remote sensing vision-language models (RSVLMs) across realistic Earth observation scenarios.
  • The benchmark assesses three key capability dimensions: perception, reasoning, and robustness, encompassing 28 fine-grained tasks with multi-source sensing data and diverse geospatial contexts.
  • OmniEarth supports multiple-choice and open-ended visual question answering (VQA) formats, including tasks with text, bounding box, and mask outputs, while reducing linguistic bias via a blind test protocol.
  • It contains a high-quality dataset of 9,275 images, including proprietary satellite imagery, and 44,210 manually verified instructions to facilitate rigorous model evaluation.
  • Benchmark results reveal that current vision-language models face significant challenges with geospatially complex tasks, highlighting the need for further development to meet remote sensing requirements.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.09471 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:OmniEarth: A Benchmark for Evaluating Vision-Language Models in Geospatial Tasks

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Abstract:Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated effective perception and reasoning capabilities on general-domain tasks, leading to growing interest in their application to Earth observation. However, a systematic benchmark for comprehensively evaluating remote sensing vision-language models (RSVLMs) remains lacking. To address this gap, we introduce OmniEarth, a benchmark for evaluating RSVLMs under realistic Earth observation scenarios. OmniEarth organizes tasks along three capability dimensions: perception, reasoning, and robustness. It defines 28 fine-grained tasks covering multi-source sensing data and diverse geospatial contexts. The benchmark supports two task formulations: multiple-choice VQA and open-ended VQA. The latter includes pure text outputs for captioning tasks, bounding box outputs for visual grounding tasks, and mask outputs for segmentation tasks. To reduce linguistic bias and examine whether model predictions rely on visual evidence, OmniEarth adopts a blind test protocol and a quintuple semantic consistency requirement. OmniEarth includes 9,275 carefully quality-controlled images, including proprietary satellite imagery from Jilin-1 (JL-1), along with 44,210 manually verified instructions. We conduct a systematic evaluation of contrastive learning-based models, general closed-source and open-source VLMs, as well as RSVLMs. Results show that existing VLMs still struggle with geospatially complex tasks, revealing clear gaps that need to be addressed for remote sensing applications. OmniEarth is publicly available at this https URL.
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09471 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.09471v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09471
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Ronghao Fu [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:22:01 UTC (36,149 KB)
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