Abstract:Remote sensing (RS) images from multiple modalities and platforms exhibit diverse details due to differences in sensor characteristics and imaging perspectives. Existing vision-language research in RS largely relies on relatively homogeneous data sources. Moreover, they still remain limited to conventional visual perception tasks such as classification or captioning. As a result, these methods fail to serve as a unified and standalone framework capable of effectively handling RS imagery from diverse sources in real-world applications. To address these issues, we propose RingMo-Agent, a model designed to handle multi-modal and multi-platform data that performs perception and reasoning tasks based on user textual instructions. Compared with existing models, RingMo-Agent 1) is supported by a large-scale vision-language dataset named RS-VL3M, comprising over 3 million image-text pairs, spanning optical, SAR, and infrared (IR) modalities collected from both satellite and UAV platforms, covering perception and challenging reasoning tasks; 2) learns modality adaptive representations by incorporating separated embedding layers to construct isolated features for heterogeneous modalities and reduce cross-modal interference; 3) unifies task modeling by introducing task-specific tokens and employing a token-based high-dimensional hidden state decoding mechanism designed for long-horizon spatial tasks. Extensive experiments on various RS vision-language tasks demonstrate that RingMo-Agent not only proves effective in both visual understanding and sophisticated analytical tasks, but also exhibits strong generalizability across different platforms and sensing modalities.
Abstract:Remote sensing foundation models largely break away from the traditional paradigm of designing task-specific models, offering greater scalability across multiple tasks. However, they face challenges such as low computational efficiency and limited interpretability, especially when dealing with high-resolution remote sensing images. To overcome these, we draw inspiration from heat conduction, a physical process modeling local heat diffusion. Building on this idea, we are the first to explore the potential of using the parallel computing model of heat conduction to simulate the local region correlations in high-resolution remote sensing images, and introduce RS-vHeat, an efficient multi-modal remote sensing foundation model. Specifically, RS-vHeat 1) applies the Heat Conduction Operator (HCO) with a complexity of $O(N^{1.5})$ and a global receptive field, reducing computational overhead while capturing remote sensing object structure information to guide heat diffusion; 2) learns the frequency distribution representations of various scenes through a self-supervised strategy based on frequency domain hierarchical masking and multi-domain reconstruction; 3) significantly improves efficiency and performance over state-of-the-art techniques across 4 tasks and 10 datasets. Compared to attention-based remote sensing foundation models, we reduces memory consumption by 84%, decreases FLOPs by 24% and improves throughput by 2.7 times.