OSM-based Domain Adaptation for Remote Sensing VLMs

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) adapted to remote sensing rely heavily on domain-specific image-text supervision, yet high-quality annotations for satellite and aerial imagery remain scarce and expensive to produce. Prevailing pseudo-labeling pipelines address this gap by distilling knowledge from large frontier models, but this dependence on large teachers is costly, limits scalability, and caps achievable performance at the ceiling of the teacher. We propose OSMDA: a self-contained domain adaptation framework that eliminates this dependency. Our key insight is that a capable base VLM can serve as its own annotation engine: by pairing aerial images with rendered OpenStreetMap (OSM) tiles, we leverage optical character recognition and chart comprehension capabilities of the model to generate captions enriched by OSM's vast auxiliary metadata. The model is then fine-tuned on the resulting corpus with satellite imagery alone, yielding OSMDA-VLM, a domain-adapted VLM that requires no manual labeling and no stronger external model. We conduct exhaustive evaluations spanning 10 benchmarks across image-text-to-text tasks and comparing against 9 competitive baselines. When equally mixed with real data, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, while being substantially cheaper to train than teacher-dependent alternatives. These results suggest that, given a strong foundation model, alignment with crowd-sourced geographic data is a practical and scalable path towards remote sensing domain adaptation. Dataset and model weights will be made publicly available.

Exploration-Driven Generative Interactive Environments

Modern world models require costly and time-consuming collection of large video datasets with action demonstrations by people or by environment-specific agents. To simplify training, we focus on using many virtual environments for inexpensive, automatically collected interaction data. Genie, a recent multi-environment world model, demonstrates simulation abilities of many environments with shared behavior. Unfortunately, training their model requires expensive demonstrations. Therefore, we propose a training framework merely using a random agent in virtual environments. While the model trained in this manner exhibits good controls, it is limited by the random exploration possibilities. To address this limitation, we propose AutoExplore Agent - an exploration agent that entirely relies on the uncertainty of the world model, delivering diverse data from which it can learn the best. Our agent is fully independent of environment-specific rewards and thus adapts easily to new environments. With this approach, the pretrained multi-environment model can quickly adapt to new environments achieving video fidelity and controllability improvement. In order to obtain automatically large-scale interaction datasets for pretraining, we group environments with similar behavior and controls. To this end, we annotate the behavior and controls of 974 virtual environments - a dataset that we name RetroAct. For building our model, we first create an open implementation of Genie - GenieRedux and apply enhancements and adaptations in our version GenieRedux-G. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/insait-institute/GenieRedux.