# ProGEO: Generating Prompts through Image-Text Contrastive Learning for Visual Geo-localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01906 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01906/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [Patch-NetVLAD: Multi-Scale Fusion of Locally-Global Descriptors for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01486/) (2021)
- [CPT: Colorful Prompt Tuning for Pre-trained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11797/) (2021)
- [CLIP-ReID: Exploiting Vision-Language Model for Image Re-Identification without Concrete Text Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13977/) (2022)
- [TransGeo: Transformer Is All You Need for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00097/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Visual Geo-localization for Large-Scale Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02287/) (2022)
- [AnyLoc: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00688/) (2023)
- [MixVPR: Feature Mixing for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02190/) (2023)
- [CLIP Models are Few-shot Learners: Empirical Studies on VQA and Visual Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07190/) (2022)
- [Self-supervising Fine-grained Region Similarities for Large-scale Image Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03926/) (2020)
- [TransVPR: Transformer-based place recognition with multi-level attention aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02001/) (2022)
- [R2Former: Unified Retrieval and Reranking Transformer for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03410/) (2023)
- [VPR-Bench: An Open-Source Visual Place Recognition Evaluation Framework with Quantifiable Viewpoint and Appearance Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08135/) (2020)
- [GSV-Cities: Toward Appropriate Supervised Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10239/) (2022)
- [Scalable Place Recognition Under Appearance Change for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00178/) (2019)
- [MuKEA: Multimodal Knowledge Extraction and Accumulation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09138/) (2022)
- [Attention-based Pyramid Aggregation Network for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00288/) (2018)
- [Inside Out Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13546/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [DescribeEarth: Describe Anything for Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25654/) (2025)
- [Feature Complementation Architecture for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12401/) (2025)
- [Scale, Don't Fine-tune: Guiding Multimodal LLMs for Efficient Visual Place Recognition at Test-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02129/) (2025)
- [Advancements in Visual Language Models for Remote Sensing: Datasets, Capabilities, and Enhancement Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17283/) (2024)
- [LocationAgent: A Hierarchical Agent for Image Geolocation via Decoupling Strategy and Evidence from Parametric Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19155/) (2026)
- [DialogueVPR: Towards Conversational Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14115/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual Geo-localization (VG) refers to the process to identify the location described in query images, which is widely applied in robotics field and computer vision tasks, such as autonomous driving, metaverse, augmented reality, and SLAM. In fine-grained images lacking specific text descriptions, directly applying pure visual methods to represent neighborhood features often leads to the model focusing on overly fine-grained features, unable to fully mine the semantic information in the images. Therefore, we propose a two-stage training method to enhance visual performance and use contrastive learning to mine challenging samples. We first leverage the multi-modal description capability of CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) to create a set of learnable text prompts for each geographic image feature to form vague descriptions. Then, by utilizing dynamic text prompts to assist the training of the image encoder, we enable the image encoder to learn better and more generalizable visual features. This strategy of applying text to purely visual tasks addresses the challenge of using multi-modal models for geographic images, which often suffer from a lack of precise descriptions, making them difficult to utilize widely. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy on several large-scale visual geo-localization datasets, and our method achieves competitive results on multiple visual geo-localization datasets. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/Chain-Mao/ProGEO.