TukaBench: A Culturally Grounded Jailbreak Benchmark for African Languages

Safety evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains heavily English-centric, leaving Low-Resource Languages (LRLs), particularly African ones, critically underexplored. We introduce TUKABENCH, a jailbreak benchmark for seven African languages that extends JailbreakBench (JBB) beyond direct translation through four settings: human translation of JBB prompts, English adaptation to African contexts followed by human translation, human-curated prompts validated through interactions with GPT-5.2, and code-switched prompts combining English and African languages, isolating the effect of language, cultural grounding, and prompt evasiveness on model safety. Across closed and open models, prompting in African languages reduces refusal relative to English, with culturally adapted prompts leading to least refusal. The evaluation also surfaces two structural limitations: model comprehension failures and reduced LLM-as-a-judge reliability in LRLs. To capture the first, we introduce Deflection alongside Refused and Jailbroken; to assess the second, we validate outputs with human annotations, showing that judge-human agreement drops in lower-resource languages and less commonly supported scripts.

GeoAI Agency Primitives

We present ongoing research on agency primitives for GeoAI assistants -- core capabilities that connect Foundation models to the artifact-centric, human-in-the-loop workflows where GIS practitioners actually work. Despite advances in satellite image captioning, visual question answering, and promptable segmentation, these capabilities have not translated into productivity gains for practitioners who spend most of their time producing vector layers, raster maps, and cartographic products. The gap is not model capability alone but the absence of an agency layer that supports iterative collaboration. We propose a vocabulary of $9$ primitives for such a layer -- including navigation, perception, geo-referenced memory, and dual modeling -- along with a benchmark that measures human productivity. Our goal is a vocabulary that makes agentic assistance in GIS implementable, testable, and comparable.

From Pixels to Patches: Pooling Strategies for Earth Embeddings

As geospatial foundation models shift from patch-level to pixel-level embeddings, practitioners must aggregate thousands of pixel vectors into patch representations that preserve class-discriminative signal while matching downstream label resolution. The default choice, mean pooling, discards within-patch variability and can drop accuracy by more than 10% under spatial shift. To evaluate this effect, we introduce EuroSAT-Embed: 81,000 embedding GeoTIFFs derived from three foundation models: AlphaEarth, OlmoEarth, and Tessera. We benchmark 11 training-free and 2 parametric pooling methods under both random and geographically disjoint test splits. Our results show that richer pooling schemes reduce the geographic generalization gap by up to 40% relative to mean pooling and increases accuracy by up to 5% on spatial splits. We recommend Generalized Mean Pooling (GeM) as a drop-in replacement for mean pooling: it improves accuracy without increasing embedding dimensionality. For maximum accuracy, Stats pooling (concatenation of min/max/mean/std pooling) performs best at 4x the embedding size. We further find that pooling effectiveness varies across embedding sources and that higher-dimensional embeddings benefit most from distributional statistics.

Satellite-Based Detection of Looted Archaeological Sites Using Machine Learning

Looting at archaeological sites poses a severe risk to cultural heritage, yet monitoring thousands of remote locations remains operationally difficult. We present a scalable and satellite-based pipeline to detect looted archaeological sites, using PlanetScope monthly mosaics (4.7m/pixel) and a curated dataset of 1,943 archaeological sites in Afghanistan (898 looted, 1,045 preserved) with multi-year imagery (2016--2023) and site-footprint masks. We compare (i) end-to-end CNN classifiers trained on raw RGB patches and (ii) traditional machine learning (ML) trained on handcrafted spectral/texture features and embeddings from recent remote-sensing foundation models. Results indicate that ImageNet-pretrained CNNs combined with spatial masking reach an F1 score of 0.926, clearly surpassing the strongest traditional ML setup, which attains an F1 score of 0.710 using SatCLIP-V+RF+Mean, i.e., location and vision embeddings fed into a Random Forest with mean-based temporal aggregation. Ablation studies demonstrate that ImageNet pretraining (even in the presence of domain shift) and spatial masking enhance performance. In contrast, geospatial foundation model embeddings perform competitively with handcrafted features, suggesting that looting signatures are extremely localized. The repository is available at https://github.com/microsoft/looted_site_detection.

BYOL: Bring Your Own Language Into LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, yet remain fundamentally constrained by the severe imbalance in global language resources. While over 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, only a small subset (fewer than 100) has sufficient digital presence to meaningfully influence modern LLM training. This disparity leads to systematic underperformance, cultural misalignment, and limited accessibility for speakers of low-resource and extreme-low-resource languages. To address this gap, we introduce Bring Your Own Language (BYOL), a unified framework for scalable, language-aware LLM development tailored to each language's digital footprint. BYOL begins with a language resource classification that maps languages into four tiers (Extreme-Low, Low, Mid, High) using curated web-scale corpora, and uses this classification to select the appropriate integration pathway. For low-resource languages, we propose a full-stack data refinement and expansion pipeline that combines corpus cleaning, synthetic text generation, continual pretraining, and supervised finetuning. Applied to Chichewa and Maori, this pipeline yields language-specific LLMs that achieve approximately 12 percent average improvement over strong multilingual baselines across 12 benchmarks, while preserving English and multilingual capabilities via weight-space model merging. For extreme-low-resource languages, we introduce a translation-mediated inclusion pathway, and show on Inuktitut that a tailored machine translation system improves over a commercial baseline by 4 BLEU, enabling high-accuracy LLM access when direct language modeling is infeasible. Finally, we release human-translated versions of the Global MMLU-Lite benchmark in Chichewa, Maori, and Inuktitut, and make our codebase and models publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/byol .

TEMPO: Global Temporal Building Density and Height Estimation from Satellite Imagery

We present TEMPO, a global, temporally resolved dataset of building density and height derived from high-resolution satellite imagery using deep learning models. We pair building footprint and height data from existing datasets with quarterly PlanetScope basemap satellite images to train a multi-task deep learning model that predicts building density and building height at a 37.6-meter per pixel resolution. We apply this model to global PlanetScope basemaps from Q1 2018 through Q2 2025 to create global, temporal maps of building density and height. We validate these maps by comparing against existing building footprint datasets. Our estimates achieve an F1 score between 85% and 88% on different hand-labeled subsets, and are temporally stable, with a 0.96 five-year trend-consistency score. TEMPO captures quarterly changes in built settlements at a fraction of the computational cost of comparable approaches, unlocking large-scale monitoring of development patterns and climate impacts essential for global resilience and adaptation efforts.

How accurate are existing land cover maps for agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Satellite Earth observations (EO) can provide affordable and timely information for assessing crop conditions and food production. Such monitoring systems are essential in Africa, where there is high food insecurity and sparse agricultural statistics. EO-based monitoring systems require accurate cropland maps to provide information about croplands, but there is a lack of data to determine which of the many available land cover maps most accurately identify cropland in African countries. This study provides a quantitative evaluation and intercomparison of 11 publicly available land cover maps to assess their suitability for cropland classification and EO-based agriculture monitoring in Africa using statistically rigorous reference datasets from 8 countries. We hope the results of this study will help users determine the most suitable map for their needs and encourage future work to focus on resolving inconsistencies between maps and improving accuracy in low-accuracy regions.

Improve State-Level Wheat Yield Forecasts in Kazakhstan on GEOGLAM's EO Data by Leveraging A Simple Spatial-Aware Technique

Accurate yield forecasting is essential for making informed policies and long-term decisions for food security. Earth Observation (EO) data and machine learning algorithms play a key role in providing a comprehensive and timely view of crop conditions from field to national scales. However, machine learning algorithms' prediction accuracy is often harmed by spatial heterogeneity caused by exogenous factors not reflected in remote sensing data, such as differences in crop management strategies. In this paper, we propose and investigate a simple technique called state-wise additive bias to explicitly address the cross-region yield heterogeneity in Kazakhstan. Compared to baseline machine learning models (Random Forest, CatBoost, XGBoost), our method reduces the overall RMSE by 8.9\% and the highest state-wise RMSE by 28.37\%. The effectiveness of state-wise additive bias indicates machine learning's performance can be significantly improved by explicitly addressing the spatial heterogeneity, motivating future work on spatial-aware machine learning algorithms for yield forecasts as well as for general geospatial forecasting problems.

Resilient In-Season Crop Type Classification in Multispectral Satellite Observations using Growth Stage Normalization

Crop type classification using satellite observations is an important tool for providing insights about planted area and enabling estimates of crop condition and yield, especially within the growing season when uncertainties around these quantities are highest. As the climate changes and extreme weather events become more frequent, these methods must be resilient to changes in domain shifts that may occur, for example, due to shifts in planting timelines. In this work, we present an approach for within-season crop type classification using moderate spatial resolution (30 m) satellite data that addresses domain shift related to planting timelines by normalizing inputs by crop growth stage. We use a neural network leveraging both convolutional and recurrent layers to predict if a pixel contains corn, soybeans, or another crop or land cover type. We evaluated this method for the 2019 growing season in the midwestern US, during which planting was delayed by as much as 1-2 months due to extreme weather that caused record flooding. We show that our approach using growth stage-normalized time series outperforms fixed-date time series, and achieves overall classification accuracy of 85.4% prior to harvest (September-November) and 82.8% by mid-season (July-September).

Rapid Response Crop Maps in Data Sparse Regions

Spatial information on cropland distribution, often called cropland or crop maps, are critical inputs for a wide range of agriculture and food security analyses and decisions. However, high-resolution cropland maps are not readily available for most countries, especially in regions dominated by smallholder farming (e.g., sub-Saharan Africa). These maps are especially critical in times of crisis when decision makers need to rapidly design and enact agriculture-related policies and mitigation strategies, including providing humanitarian assistance, dispersing targeted aid, or boosting productivity for farmers. A major challenge for developing crop maps is that many regions do not have readily accessible ground truth data on croplands necessary for training and validating predictive models, and field campaigns are not feasible for collecting labels for rapid response. We present a method for rapid mapping of croplands in regions where little to no ground data is available. We present results for this method in Togo, where we delivered a high-resolution (10 m) cropland map in under 10 days to facilitate rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic by the Togolese government. This demonstrated a successful transition of machine learning applications research to operational rapid response in a real humanitarian crisis. All maps, data, and code are publicly available to enable future research and operational systems in data-sparse regions.