# UrbanCross: Enhancing Satellite Image-Text Retrieval with Cross-Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14241 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14241/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11029/) (2023)
- [Towards Revealing the Mystery behind Chain of Thought: A Theoretical Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15408/) (2023)
- [Exploring Models and Data for Remote Sensing Image Caption Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07835/) (2017)
- [RSPrompter: Learning to Prompt for Remote Sensing Instance Segmentation based on Visual Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16269/) (2023)
- [Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Towards Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03987/) (2022)
- [Remote Sensing Cross-Modal Text-Image Retrieval Based on Global and Local Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09860/) (2022)
- [Domain Adversarial Spatial-Temporal Network: A Transferable Framework for Short-term Traffic Forecasting across Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03630/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Cross-Domain Data Fusion in Urban Computing: Taxonomy, Advances, and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19348/) (2024)
- [UV-SAM: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Urban Village Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08083/) (2024)
- [Generative Cross-Modal Retrieval: Memorizing Images in Multimodal Language Models for Retrieval and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10805/) (2024)
- [Smart City Development with Urban Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01552/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04509/) (2024)
- [Position: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Significantly Advance Scientific Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02871/) (2025)
- [Foundation Models for Spatio-Temporal Data Science: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13502/) (2025)
- [DocPruner: A Storage-Efficient Framework for Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Adaptive Patch-Level Embedding Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23883/) (2025)
- [GeoMag: A Vision-Language Model for Pixel-level Fine-Grained Remote Sensing Image Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05887/) (2025)
- [A Satellite-Ground Synergistic Large Vision-Language Model System for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05731/) (2025)
- [Satellites Reveal Mobility: A Commuting Origin-destination Flow Generator for Global Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15870/) (2025)
- [iEBAKER: Improved Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval Framework via Eliminate Before Align and Keyword Explicit Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05644/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Collaborative Reasoning with Tool-Augmented Evidence for Urban Region Profiling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13558/) (2026)
- [CoST: Semantic-Aware Urban Understanding via Spatial-Temporal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21041/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Urbanization challenges underscore the necessity for effective satellite image-text retrieval methods to swiftly access specific information enriched with geographic semantics for urban applications. However, existing methods often overlook significant domain gaps across diverse urban landscapes, primarily focusing on enhancing retrieval performance within single domains. To tackle this issue, we present UrbanCross, a new framework for cross-domain satellite image-text retrieval. UrbanCross leverages a high-quality, cross-domain dataset enriched with extensive geo-tags from three countries to highlight domain diversity. It employs the Large Multimodal Model (LMM) for textual refinement and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for visual augmentation, achieving a fine-grained alignment of images, segments and texts, yielding a 10% improvement in retrieval performance. Additionally, UrbanCross incorporates an adaptive curriculum-based source sampler and a weighted adversarial cross-domain fine-tuning module, progressively enhancing adaptability across various domains. Extensive experiments confirm UrbanCross's superior efficiency in retrieval and adaptation to new urban environments, demonstrating an average performance increase of 15% over its version without domain adaptation mechanisms, effectively bridging the domain gap.