Geospatial Chain of Thought Reasoning for Enhanced Visual Question Answering on Satellite Imagery

Geospatial chain of thought (CoT) reasoning is essential for advancing Visual Question Answering (VQA) on satellite imagery, particularly in climate related applications such as disaster monitoring, infrastructure risk assessment, urban resilience planning, and policy support. Existing VQA models enable scalable interpretation of remote sensing data but often lack the structured reasoning required for complex geospatial queries. We propose a VQA framework that integrates CoT reasoning with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to improve interpretability, robustness, and accuracy. By generating intermediate rationales, the model better handles tasks involving detection, classification, spatial relations, and comparative analysis, which are critical for reliable decision support in high stakes climate domains. Experiments show that CoT supervision improves accuracy by 34.9\% over direct baselines, while DPO yields additional gains in accuracy and reasoning quality. The resulting system advances VQA for multispectral Earth observation by enabling richer geospatial reasoning and more effective climate use cases.

Supply chain emission estimation using large language models

Large enterprises face a crucial imperative to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially goal 13, which focuses on combating climate change and its impacts. To mitigate the effects of climate change, reducing enterprise Scope 3 (supply chain emissions) is vital, as it accounts for more than 90\% of total emission inventories. However, tracking Scope 3 emissions proves challenging, as data must be collected from thousands of upstream and downstream suppliers.To address the above mentioned challenges, we propose a first-of-a-kind framework that uses domain-adapted NLP foundation models to estimate Scope 3 emissions, by utilizing financial transactions as a proxy for purchased goods and services. We compared the performance of the proposed framework with the state-of-art text classification models such as TF-IDF, word2Vec, and Zero shot learning. Our results show that the domain-adapted foundation model outperforms state-of-the-art text mining techniques and performs as well as a subject matter expert (SME). The proposed framework could accelerate the Scope 3 estimation at Enterprise scale and will help to take appropriate climate actions to achieve SDG 13.