Agentic AI for Remote Sensing: Technical Challenges and Research Directions

Earth Observation (EO) is moving beyond static prediction toward multi-step analytical workflows that require coordinated reasoning over data, tools, and geospatial state. While foundation models and vision-language models have expanded representation learning and language-grounded interaction for remote sensing, and agentic AI has demonstrated long-horizon reasoning and external tool use, EO is not a straightforward extension of generic agentic AI. EO workflows operate over georeferenced, multi-modal, and temporally structured data, where operations such as reprojection, resampling, compositing, and aggregation actively transform the underlying state and can constrain subsequent analysis. As a result, errors may propagate silently across steps, and correctness depends not only on internal coherence, but also on geospatial consistency, temporally valid comparisons, and physical validity. This position paper argues that these challenges are structural rather than incidental. We identify the implicit assumptions commonly made in generic agentic models, analyze how they break in geospatial workflows, and characterize the resulting failure modes in multi-step EO pipelines. We then outline design principles for EO-native agents centered on structured geospatial state, tool-aware reasoning, verifier-guided execution, and learning objectives aligned with geospatial and physical validity. Finally, we present research directions spanning EO-specific benchmarks, hybrid supervised and reinforcement learning, constrained self-improvement, and trajectory-level evaluation beyond final-answer accuracy. Building reliable geospatial agents therefore requires rethinking agent design around the physical, geospatial, and workflow constraints that govern EO analysis.

TerraScope: Pixel-Grounded Visual Reasoning for Earth Observation

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in earth observation (EO), yet they struggle with tasks that require grounding complex spatial reasoning in precise pixel-level visual representations. To address this problem, we introduce TerraScope, a unified VLM that delivers pixel-grounded geospatial reasoning with two key capabilities: (1) modality-flexible reasoning: it handles single-modality inputs (optical or SAR) and adaptively fuses different modalities into the reasoning process when both are available; (2) multi-temporal reasoning: it integrates temporal sequences for change analysis across multiple time points. In addition, we curate Terra-CoT, a large-scale dataset containing 1 million samples with pixel-level masks embedded in reasoning chains across multiple sources. We also propose TerraScope-Bench, the first benchmark for pixel-grounded geospatial reasoning with six sub-tasks that evaluates both answer accuracy and mask quality to ensure authentic pixel-grounded reasoning. Experiments show that TerraScope significantly outperforms existing VLMs on pixel-grounded geospatial reasoning while providing interpretable visual evidence.

Learning Domain-Aware Task Prompt Representations for Multi-Domain All-in-One Image Restoration

Recently, significant breakthroughs have been made in all-in-one image restoration (AiOIR), which can handle multiple restoration tasks with a single model. However, existing methods typically focus on a specific image domain, such as natural scene, medical imaging, or remote sensing. In this work, we aim to extend AiOIR to multiple domains and propose the first multi-domain all-in-one image restoration method, DATPRL-IR, based on our proposed Domain-Aware Task Prompt Representation Learning. Specifically, we first construct a task prompt pool containing multiple task prompts, in which task-related knowledge is implicitly encoded. For each input image, the model adaptively selects the most relevant task prompts and composes them into an instance-level task representation via a prompt composition mechanism (PCM). Furthermore, to endow the model with domain awareness, we introduce another domain prompt pool and distill domain priors from multimodal large language models into the domain prompts. PCM is utilized to combine the adaptively selected domain prompts into a domain representation for each input image. Finally, the two representations are fused to form a domain-aware task prompt representation which can make full use of both specific and shared knowledge across tasks and domains to guide the subsequent restoration process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DATPRL-IR significantly outperforms existing SOTA image restoration methods, while exhibiting strong generalization capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/GuangluDong0728/DATPRL-IR.

Dual Distillation for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is a critical task in computer vision with profound implications for medical imaging, where identifying pathologies early can directly impact patient outcomes. While recent unsupervised anomaly detection approaches show promise, they require substantial normal training data and struggle to generalize across anatomical contexts. We introduce D$^2$4FAD, a novel dual distillation framework for few-shot anomaly detection that identifies anomalies in previously unseen tasks using only a small number of normal reference images. Our approach leverages a pre-trained encoder as a teacher network to extract multi-scale features from both support and query images, while a student decoder learns to distill knowledge from the teacher on query images and self-distill on support images. We further propose a learn-to-weight mechanism that dynamically assesses the reference value of each support image conditioned on the query, optimizing anomaly detection performance. To evaluate our method, we curate a comprehensive benchmark dataset comprising 13,084 images across four organs, four imaging modalities, and five disease categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D$^2$4FAD significantly outperforms existing approaches, establishing a new state-of-the-art in few-shot medical anomaly detection. Code is available at https://github.com/ttttqz/D24FAD.

OpenEarthAgent: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Geospatial Agents

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has enabled agents that can interpret imagery, connect it with language, and perform structured analytical tasks. Extending such capabilities to the remote sensing domain remains challenging, as models must reason over spatial scale, geographic structures, and multispectral indices while maintaining coherent multi-step logic. To bridge this gap, OpenEarthAgent introduces a unified framework for developing tool-augmented geospatial agents trained on satellite imagery, natural-language queries, and detailed reasoning traces. The training pipeline relies on supervised fine-tuning over structured reasoning trajectories, aligning the model with verified multistep tool interactions across diverse analytical contexts. The accompanying corpus comprises 14,538 training and 1,169 evaluation instances, with more than 100K reasoning steps in the training split and over 7K reasoning steps in the evaluation split. It spans urban, environmental, disaster, and infrastructure domains, and incorporates GIS-based operations alongside index analyses such as NDVI, NBR, and NDBI. Grounded in explicit reasoning traces, the learned agent demonstrates structured reasoning, stable spatial understanding, and interpretable behaviour through tool-driven geospatial interactions across diverse conditions. We report consistent improvements over a strong baseline and competitive performance relative to recent open and closed-source models.

Multitask Learning for Earth Observation Data Classification with Hybrid Quantum Network

Quantum machine learning (QML) has gained increasing attention as a potential solution to address the challenges of computation requirements in the future. Earth observation (EO) has entered the era of Big Data, and the computational demands for effectively analyzing large EO data with complex deep learning models have become a bottleneck. Motivated by this, we aim to leverage quantum computing for EO data classification and explore its advantages despite the current limitations of quantum devices. This paper presents a hybrid model that incorporates multitask learning to assist efficient data encoding and employs a location weight module with quantum convolution operations to extract valid features for classification. The validity of our proposed model was evaluated using multiple EO benchmarks. Additionally, we experimentally explored the generalizability of our model and investigated the factors contributing to its advantage, highlighting the potential of QML in EO data analysis.

Earth Embeddings as Products: Taxonomy, Ecosystem, and Standardized Access

Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) provide powerful representations, but high compute costs hinder their widespread use. Pre-computed embedding data products offer a practical "frozen" alternative, yet they currently exist in a fragmented ecosystem of incompatible formats and resolutions. This lack of standardization creates an engineering bottleneck that prevents meaningful model comparison and reproducibility. We formalize this landscape through a three-layer taxonomy: Data, Tools, and Value. We survey existing products to identify interoperability barriers. To bridge this gap, we extend TorchGeo with a unified API that standardizes the loading and querying of diverse embedding products. By treating embeddings as first-class geospatial datasets, we decouple downstream analysis from model-specific engineering, providing a roadmap for more transparent and accessible Earth observation workflows.

A Deep Dive into OpenStreetMap Research Since its Inception (2008-2024): Contributors, Topics, and Future Trends

OpenStreetMap (OSM) has transitioned from a pioneering volunteered geographic information (VGI) project into a global, multi-disciplinary research nexus. This study presents a bibliometric and systematic analysis of the OSM research landscape, examining its development trajectory and key driving forces. By evaluating 1,926 publications from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection and 782 State of the Map (SotM) presentations up to June 2024, we quantify publication growth, collaboration patterns, and thematic evolution. Results demonstrate simultaneous consolidation and diversification within the field. While a stable core of contributors continues to anchor OSM research, themes have shifted from initial concerns over data production and quality toward advanced analytical and applied uses. Comparative analysis of OSM-related research in WoS and SotM reveals distinct but complementary agendas between scholars and the OSM community. Building on these findings, we identify six emerging research directions and discuss how evolving partnerships among academia, the OSM community, and industry are poised to shape the future of OSM research. This study establishes a structured reference for understanding the state of OSM studies and offers strategic pathways for navigating its future trajectory.The data and code are available at https://github.com/ya0-sun/OSMbib.

Unified Primitive Proxies for Structured Shape Completion

Structured shape completion recovers missing geometry as primitives rather than as unstructured points, which enables primitive-based surface reconstruction. Instead of following the prevailing cascade, we rethink how primitives and points should interact, and find it more effective to decode primitives in a dedicated pathway that attends to shared shape features. Following this principle, we present UniCo, which in a single feed-forward pass predicts a set of primitives with complete geometry, semantics, and inlier membership. To drive this unified representation, we introduce primitive proxies, learnable queries that are contextualized to produce assembly-ready outputs. To ensure consistent optimization, our training strategy couples primitives and points with online target updates. Across synthetic and real-world benchmarks with four independent assembly solvers, UniCo consistently outperforms recent baselines, lowering Chamfer distance by up to 50% and improving normal consistency by up to 7%. These results establish an attractive recipe for structured 3D understanding from incomplete data. Project page: https://unico-completion.github.io.

Reconstructing Building Height from Spaceborne TomoSAR Point Clouds Using a Dual-Topology Network

Reliable building height estimation is essential for various urban applications. Spaceborne SAR tomography (TomoSAR) provides weather-independent, side-looking observations that capture facade-level structure, offering a promising alternative to conventional optical methods. However, TomoSAR point clouds often suffer from noise, anisotropic point distributions, and data voids on incoherent surfaces, all of which hinder accurate height reconstruction. To address these challenges, we introduce a learning-based framework for converting raw TomoSAR points into high-resolution building height maps. Our dual-topology network alternates between a point branch that models irregular scatterer features and a grid branch that enforces spatial consistency. By jointly processing these representations, the network denoises the input points and inpaints missing regions to produce continuous height estimates. To our knowledge, this is the first proof of concept for large-scale urban height mapping directly from TomoSAR point clouds. Extensive experiments on data from Munich and Berlin validate the effectiveness of our approach. Moreover, we demonstrate that our framework can be extended to incorporate optical satellite imagery, further enhancing reconstruction quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/tomosar2height.