Generative AI offers new opportunities for automating urban planning by creating site-specific urban layouts and enabling flexible design exploration. However, existing approaches often struggle to produce realistic and practical designs at scale. Therefore, we adapt a state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model, extended with ControlNet, to generate high-fidelity satellite imagery conditioned on land use descriptions, infrastructure, and natural environments. To overcome data availability limitations, we spatially link satellite imagery with structured land use and constraint information from OpenStreetMap. Using data from three major U.S. cities, we demonstrate that the proposed diffusion model generates realistic and diverse urban landscapes by varying land-use configurations, road networks, and water bodies, facilitating cross-city learning and design diversity. We also systematically evaluate the impacts of varying language prompts and control imagery on the quality of satellite imagery generation. Our model achieves high FID and KID scores and demonstrates robustness across diverse urban contexts. Qualitative assessments from urban planners and the general public show that generated images align closely with design descriptions and constraints, and are often preferred over real images. This work establishes a benchmark for controlled urban imagery generation and highlights the potential of generative AI as a tool for enhancing planning workflows and public engagement.

Remote sensing (RS) images are usually produced at an unprecedented scale, yet they are geographically and institutionally distributed, making centralized model training challenging due to data-sharing restrictions and privacy concerns. Federated learning (FL) offers a solution by enabling collaborative model training across decentralized RS data sources without exposing raw data. However, there lacks a realistic federated dataset and benchmark in RS. Prior works typically rely on manually partitioned single dataset, which fail to capture the heterogeneity and scale of real-world RS data, and often use inconsistent experimental setups, hindering fair comparison. To address this gap, we propose a realistic federated RS dataset, termed FedRS. FedRS consists of eight datasets that cover various sensors and resolutions and builds 135 clients, which is representative of realistic operational scenarios. Data for each client come from the same source, exhibiting authentic federated properties such as skewed label distributions, imbalanced client data volumes, and domain heterogeneity across clients. These characteristics reflect practical challenges in federated RS and support evaluation of FL methods at scale. Based on FedRS, we implement 10 baseline FL algorithms and evaluation metrics to construct the comprehensive FedRS-Bench. The experimental results demonstrate that FL can consistently improve model performance over training on isolated data silos, while revealing performance trade-offs of different methods under varying client heterogeneity and availability conditions. We hope FedRS-Bench will accelerate research on large-scale, realistic FL in RS by providing a standardized, rich testbed and facilitating fair comparisons across future works. The source codes and dataset are available at https://fedrs-bench.github.io/.

Urban land use classification and mapping are critical for urban planning, resource management, and environmental monitoring. Existing remote sensing techniques often lack precision in complex urban environments due to the absence of ground-level details. Unlike aerial perspectives, street view images provide a ground-level view that captures more human and social activities relevant to land use in complex urban scenes. Existing street view-based methods primarily rely on supervised classification, which is challenged by the scarcity of high-quality labeled data and the difficulty of generalizing across diverse urban landscapes. This study introduces an unsupervised contrastive clustering model for street view images with a built-in geographical prior, to enhance clustering performance. When combined with a simple visual assignment of the clusters, our approach offers a flexible and customizable solution to land use mapping, tailored to the specific needs of urban planners. We experimentally show that our method can generate land use maps from geotagged street view image datasets of two cities. As our methodology relies on the universal spatial coherence of geospatial data ("Tobler's law"), it can be adapted to various settings where street view images are available, to enable scalable, unsupervised land use mapping and updating. The code will be available at https://github.com/lin102/CCGP.

We present UAV-CodeAgents, a scalable multi-agent framework for autonomous UAV mission generation, built on large language and vision-language models (LLMs/VLMs). The system leverages the ReAct (Reason + Act) paradigm to interpret satellite imagery, ground high-level natural language instructions, and collaboratively generate UAV trajectories with minimal human supervision. A core component is a vision-grounded, pixel-pointing mechanism that enables precise localization of semantic targets on aerial maps. To support real-time adaptability, we introduce a reactive thinking loop, allowing agents to iteratively reflect on observations, revise mission goals, and coordinate dynamically in evolving environments. UAV-CodeAgents is evaluated on large-scale mission scenarios involving industrial and environmental fire detection. Our results show that a lower decoding temperature (0.5) yields higher planning reliability and reduced execution time, with an average mission creation time of 96.96 seconds and a success rate of 93%. We further fine-tune Qwen2.5VL-7B on 9,000 annotated satellite images, achieving strong spatial grounding across diverse visual categories. To foster reproducibility and future research, we will release the full codebase and a novel benchmark dataset for vision-language-based UAV planning.

The availability of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite imagery has increased considerably in recent years, with datasets commercially available. However, the acquisition of high-resolution SAR images in airborne configurations, remains costly and limited. Thus, the lack of open source, well-labeled, or easily exploitable SAR text-image datasets is a barrier to the use of existing foundation models in remote sensing applications. In this context, synthetic image generation is a promising solution to augment this scarce data, enabling a broader range of applications. Leveraging over 15 years of ONERA's extensive archival airborn data from acquisition campaigns, we created a comprehensive training dataset of 110 thousands SAR images to exploit a 3.5 billion parameters pre-trained latent diffusion model \cite{Baqu2019SethiR}. In this work, we present a novel approach utilizing spatial conditioning techniques within a foundation model to transform satellite SAR imagery into airborne SAR representations. Additionally, we demonstrate that our pipeline is effective for bridging the realism of simulated images generated by ONERA's physics-based simulator EMPRISE \cite{empriseem_ai_images}. Our method explores a key application of AI in advancing SAR imaging technology. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce this approach in the literature.

Accurate building segmentation from high-resolution RGB imagery remains challenging due to spectral similarity with non-building features, shadows, and irregular building geometries. In this study, we present a comprehensive deep learning framework for multiscale building segmentation using RGB aerial and satellite imagery with spatial resolutions ranging from 0.4m to 2.7m. We curate a diverse, multi-sensor dataset and introduce feature-augmented inputs by deriving secondary representations including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Visible Difference Vegetation Index (VDVI), Morphological Building Index (MBI), and Sobel edge filters from RGB channels. These features guide a Res-U-Net architecture in learning complex spatial patterns more effectively. We also propose training policies incorporating layer freezing, cyclical learning rates, and SuperConvergence to reduce training time and resource usage. Evaluated on a held-out WorldView-3 image, our model achieves an overall accuracy of 96.5%, an F1-score of 0.86, and an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.80, outperforming existing RGB-based benchmarks. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of combining multi-resolution imagery, feature augmentation, and optimized training strategies for robust building segmentation in remote sensing applications.

F oundation models constitute a significant advancement in computer vision: after a single, albeit costly, training phase, they can address a wide array of tasks. In the field of Earth observation, over 75 remote sensing vision foundation models have been developed in the past four years. However, none has consistently outperformed the others across all available downstream tasks. T o facilitate their comparison, we propose a cost-effective method for predicting a model's performance on multiple downstream tasks without the need for fine-tuning on each one. This method is based on what we call "capabilities encoding. " The utility of this novel approach is twofold: we demonstrate its potential to simplify the selection of a foundation model for a given new task, and we employ it to offer a fresh perspective on the existing literature, suggesting avenues for future research.

Segmentation models can recognize a pre-defined set of objects in images. However, models that can reason over complex user queries that implicitly refer to multiple objects of interest are still in their infancy. Recent advances in reasoning segmentation--generating segmentation masks from complex, implicit query text--demonstrate that vision-language models can operate across an open domain and produce reasonable outputs. However, our experiments show that such models struggle with complex remote-sensing imagery. In this work, we introduce LISAt, a vision-language model designed to describe complex remote-sensing scenes, answer questions about them, and segment objects of interest. We trained LISAt on a new curated geospatial reasoning-segmentation dataset, GRES, with 27,615 annotations over 9,205 images, and a multimodal pretraining dataset, PreGRES, containing over 1 million question-answer pairs. LISAt outperforms existing geospatial foundation models such as RS-GPT4V by over 10.04 % (BLEU-4) on remote-sensing description tasks, and surpasses state-of-the-art open-domain models on reasoning segmentation tasks by 143.36 % (gIoU). Our model, datasets, and code are available at https://lisat-bair.github.io/LISAt/

This paper addresses the challenge of mapping polygonal buildings from remote sensing images and introduces a novel algorithm, the Global Collinearity-aware Polygonizer (GCP). GCP, built upon an instance segmentation framework, processes binary masks produced by any instance segmentation model. The algorithm begins by collecting polylines sampled along the contours of the binary masks. These polylines undergo a refinement process using a transformer-based regression module to ensure they accurately fit the contours of the targeted building instances. Subsequently, a collinearity-aware polygon simplification module simplifies these refined polylines and generate the final polygon representation. This module employs dynamic programming technique to optimize an objective function that balances the simplicity and fidelity of the polygons, achieving globally optimal solutions. Furthermore, the optimized collinearity-aware objective is seamlessly integrated into network training, enhancing the cohesiveness of the entire pipeline. The effectiveness of GCP has been validated on two public benchmarks for polygonal building mapping. Further experiments reveal that applying the collinearity-aware polygon simplification module to arbitrary polylines, without prior knowledge, enhances accuracy over traditional methods such as the Douglas-Peucker algorithm. This finding underscores the broad applicability of GCP. The code for the proposed method will be made available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab.

Advancements in remote sensing (RS) imagery have provided high-resolution detail and vast coverage, yet existing methods, such as image-level captioning/retrieval and object-level detection/segmentation, often fail to capture mid-scale semantic entities essential for interpreting large-scale scenes. To address this, we propose the conteXtual referring Map (XeMap) task, which focuses on contextual, fine-grained localization of text-referred regions in large-scale RS scenes. Unlike traditional approaches, XeMap enables precise mapping of mid-scale semantic entities that are often overlooked in image-level or object-level methods. To achieve this, we introduce XeMap-Network, a novel architecture designed to handle the complexities of pixel-level cross-modal contextual referring mapping in RS. The network includes a fusion layer that applies self- and cross-attention mechanisms to enhance the interaction between text and image embeddings. Furthermore, we propose a Hierarchical Multi-Scale Semantic Alignment (HMSA) module that aligns multiscale visual features with the text semantic vector, enabling precise multimodal matching across large-scale RS imagery. To support XeMap task, we provide a novel, annotated dataset, XeMap-set, specifically tailored for this task, overcoming the lack of XeMap datasets in RS imagery. XeMap-Network is evaluated in a zero-shot setting against state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating superior performance. This highlights its effectiveness in accurately mapping referring regions and providing valuable insights for interpreting large-scale RS environments.