# Vision-Language Models in Remote Sensing: Current Progress and Future Trends

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05726 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05726/

## Key facts

- Cited by 93 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 170 of its 292 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 170)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 93)

- [RSGPT: A Remote Sensing Vision Language Model and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15266/) (2023)
- [RS5M and GeoRSCLIP: A Large Scale Vision-Language Dataset and A Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11300/) (2023)
- [LHRS-Bot: Empowering Remote Sensing with VGI-Enhanced Large Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02544/) (2024)
- [VRSBench: A Versatile Vision-Language Benchmark Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12384/) (2024)
- [Remote Sensing Vision-Language Foundation Models without Annotations via Ground Remote Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06960/) (2023)
- [TEOChat: A Large Vision-Language Assistant for Temporal Earth Observation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06234/) (2024)
- [Text2Earth: Unlocking Text-driven Remote Sensing Image Generation with a Global-Scale Dataset and a Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00895/) (2025)
- [Towards Vision-Language Geo-Foundation Model: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09385/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Captioning and Retrieving Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06475/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Models for Edge Networks: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07855/) (2025)
- [Artificial intelligence to advance Earth observation: : A review of models, recent trends, and pathways forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08413/) (2023)
- [SARATR-X: Toward Building A Foundation Model for SAR Target Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09365/) (2024)
- [ChatEarthNet: A Global-Scale Image-Text Dataset Empowering Vision-Language Geo-Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11325/) (2024)
- [CHOICE: Benchmarking the Remote Sensing Capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18145/) (2024)
- [An LLM Agent for Automatic Geospatial Data Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18792/) (2024)
- [RingMo-Agent: A Unified Remote Sensing Foundation Model for Multi-Platform and Multi-Modal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20776/) (2025)
- [Geo-R1: Improving Few-Shot Geospatial Referring Expression Understanding with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21976/) (2025)
- [Bootstrapping Interactive Image-Text Alignment for Remote Sensing Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01191/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Modeling Meets Remote Sensing: Models, Datasets and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14361/) (2025)
- [SARLANG-1M: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Modeling in SAR Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03254/) (2025)
- [RS-MoE: A Vision-Language Model with Mixture of Experts for Remote Sensing Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01595/) (2024)
- [REOBench: Benchmarking Robustness of Earth Observation Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16793/) (2025)
- [When Geoscience Meets Foundation Models: Towards General Geoscience Artificial Intelligence System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06799/) (2023)
- [PatFig: Generating Short and Long Captions for Patent Figures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08379/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models in Remote Sensing: Evolving from Unimodality to Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00988/) (2026)
- [SeaMo: A Season-Aware Multimodal Foundation Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19237/) (2024)
- [LiT-4-RSVQA: Lightweight Transformer-based Visual Question Answering in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00758/) (2023)
- [Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation for Remote Sensing Images via Multi-scale Uncertainty Consistency and Cross-Teacher-Student Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10736/) (2025)
- [GeoReason: Aligning Thinking And Answering In Remote Sensing Vision-Language Models Via Logical Consistency Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04118/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Remote Sensing Vision-Language Models for Zero-Shot Scene Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00698/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The remarkable achievements of ChatGPT and GPT-4 have sparked a wave of interest and research in the field of large language models for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). These models provide intelligent solutions close to human thinking, enabling us to use general artificial intelligence to solve problems in various applications. However, in remote sensing (RS), the scientific literature on the implementation of AGI remains relatively scant. Existing AI-related research in remote sensing primarily focuses on visual understanding tasks while neglecting the semantic understanding of the objects and their relationships. This is where vision-language models excel, as they enable reasoning about images and their associated textual descriptions, allowing for a deeper understanding of the underlying semantics. Vision-language models can go beyond visual recognition of RS images, model semantic relationships, and generate natural language descriptions of the image. This makes them better suited for tasks requiring visual and textual understanding, such as image captioning, and visual question answering. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the research on vision-language models in remote sensing, summarizing the latest progress, highlighting challenges, and identifying potential research opportunities.