FlexiMo: A Flexible Remote Sensing Foundation Model
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Abstract (arXiv)
The rapid expansion of multi-source satellite imagery drives innovation in Earth observation, opening unprecedented opportunities for Remote Sensing Foundation Models to harness diverse data. However, many existing models remain constrained by fixed spatial resolutions and patch sizes, limiting their ability to fully exploit the heterogeneous spatial characteristics inherent in satellite imagery. To address these challenges, we propose FlexiMo, a flexible remote sensing foundation model that endows the pre-trained model with the flexibility to adapt to arbitrary spatial resolutions. Central to FlexiMo is a spatial resolution-aware module that employs a parameter-free alignment embedding mechanism to dynamically recalibrate patch embeddings based on the input image's resolution and dimensions. This design not only preserves critical token characteristics and ensures multi-scale feature fidelity but also enables efficient feature extraction without requiring modifications to the underlying network architecture. In addition, FlexiMo incorporates a lightweight channel adaptation module that leverages prior spectral information from sensors. This mechanism allows the model to process images with varying numbers of channels while maintaining the data's intrinsic physical properties. Extensive experiments on diverse multimodal, multi-resolution, and multi-scale datasets demonstrate that FlexiMo significantly enhances model generalization and robustness. In particular, our method achieves outstanding performance across a range of downstream tasks, including scene classification, land cover classification, urban building segmentation, and cloud detection. By enabling parameter-efficient and physically consistent adaptation, FlexiMo paves the way for more adaptable and effective foundation models in real-world remote sensing applications.
Key facts. Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 38 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2025.
Builds on
38 of 60 references.
References · 38
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 30,186
- 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,713
- 2021Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windowscited by 12,139
- 2021Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learnerscited by 7,403
- 2021SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformerscited by 2,940
- 2015Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localizationcited by 2,436
- 2017Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentationcited by 2,161
- 2020Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attentioncited by 2,022
- 2017EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classificationcited by 1,496
- 2018Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understandingcited by 1,271
- 2022SatMAE: Pre-training Transformers for Temporal and Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagerycited by 408
- 2023RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensingcited by 363
26 more
- 2023GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensingcited by 328
- 2022Scale-MAE: A Scale-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multiscale Geospatial Representation Learningcited by 308
- 2023SpectralGPT: Spectral Remote Sensing Foundation Modelcited by 252
- 2021Seasonal Contrast: Unsupervised Pre-Training from Uncurated Remote Sensing Datacited by 215
- 2023SkySense: A Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Foundation Model Towards Universal Interpretation for Earth Observation Imagerycited by 205
- 2020Geography-Aware Self-Supervised Learningcited by 190
- 2023EfficientViT: Memory Efficient Vision Transformer with Cascaded Group Attentioncited by 172
- 2023CROMA: Remote Sensing Representations with Contrastive Radar-Optical Masked Autoencoderscited by 169
- 2022FlexiViT: One Model for All Patch Sizescited by 152
- 2024Neural Plasticity-Inspired Multimodal Foundation Model for Earth Observationcited by 104
- 2024AnySat: One Earth Observation Model for Many Resolutions, Scales, and Modalitiescited by 74
- 2024CRS-Diff: Controllable Remote Sensing Image Generation with Diffusion Modelcited by 55
- 2023Feature Guided Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Learning in Remote Sensingcited by 48
- 2022Self-supervised Vision Transformers for Joint SAR-optical Representation Learningcited by 40
- 2024UV-SAM: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Urban Village Identificationcited by 29
- 2023USat: A Unified Self-Supervised Encoder for Multi-Sensor Satellite Imagerycited by 28
- 2025Scaling Laws in Patchification: An Image Is Worth 50,176 Tokens And Morecited by 28
- 2024ViTAR: Vision Transformer with Any Resolutioncited by 25
- 2021Building extraction with vision transformercited by 22
- 2024SenPa-MAE: Sensor Parameter Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multi-Satellite Self-Supervised Pretrainingcited by 18
- 2024RSBuilding: Towards General Remote Sensing Image Building Extraction and Change Detection with Foundation Modelcited by 12
- 2024RSAM-Seg: A SAM-based Approach with Prior Knowledge Integration for Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentationcited by 9
- 2024High-Resolution Cloud Detection Networkcited by 8
- 2025UrbanSAM: Learning Invariance-Inspired Adapters for Segment Anything Models in Urban Constructioncited by 8
- 2024Adapting Vision Foundation Models for Robust Cloud Segmentation in Remote Sensing Imagescited by 7
- 2024MSPE: Multi-Scale Patch Embedding Prompts Vision Transformers to Any Resolutioncited by 6
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 17; 2026: 7.
24 papers.
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- 2025TESSERA: Temporal Embeddings of Surface Spectra for Earth Representation and Analysiscited by 39
- 2025Geospatial Foundation Models to Enable Progress on Sustainable Development Goalscited by 10
- 2025GeoLink: Empowering Remote Sensing Foundation Model with OpenStreetMap Datacited by 8
- 2026THOR: A Versatile Foundation Model for Earth Observation Climate and Society Applicationscited by 7
- 2025RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observationcited by 4
- 2025Survey of Multimodal Geospatial Foundation Models: Techniques, Applications, and Challengescited by 3
- 2025Any-Optical-Model: A Universal Foundation Model for Optical Remote Sensingcited by 3
- 2025FUSE-RSVLM: Feature Fusion Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensingcited by 3
- 2025CARL: Camera-Agnostic Representation Learning for Spectral Image Analysiscited by 2
- 2025CLDTracker: A Comprehensive Language Description for Visual Trackingcited by 2
- 2025ChatENV: An Interactive Vision-Language Model for Sensor-Guided Environmental Monitoring and Scenario Simulationcited by 2
- 2025MAESTRO: Masked AutoEncoders for Multimodal, Multitemporal, and Multispectral Earth Observation Datacited by 2
12 more
- 2026Agentic AI for Remote Sensing: Technical Challenges and Research Directionscited by 2
- 2025Atomizer: Generalizing to new modalities by breaking satellite images down to a set of scalarscited by 1
- 2025Landslide Hazard Mapping with Geospatial Foundation Models: Geographical Generalizability, Data Scarcity, and Band Adaptabilitycited by 1
- 2025AMD-HookNet++: Evolution of AMD-HookNet with Hybrid CNN-Transformer Feature Enhancement for Glacier Calving Front Segmentationcited by 1
- 2025Thinking on Maps: How Foundation Model Agents Explore, Remember, and Reason Map Environmentscited by 1
- 2026SIGMAE: A Spectral-Index-Guided Foundation Model for Multispectral Remote Sensingcited by 1
- 2025Spatial-Temporal-Spectral Unified Modeling for Remote Sensing Dense Predictioncited by 0
- 2025BioAnalyst: A Foundation Model for Biodiversitycited by 0
- 2026Earth Science Foundation Models: From Perception to Reasoning and Discoverycited by 0
- 2026Earth Observation Foundation Models for Terrestrial Ecohydrology: From Representation Learning to Process Inferencecited by 0
- 2026VesselBench-800K: A Large-scale Perception Benchmark for Multimodal Vessel Detection, Counting, and Density Estimationcited by 0
- 2026Atomizer-IO: Beyond Pixels, Patches and Gridscited by 0
- 2026Atomizer-IO: Beyond Pixels, Patches and Grids30 Sep 2026
- 2026VesselBench-800K: A Large-scale Perception Benchmark for Multimodal Vessel Detection, Counting, and Density Estimation29 Sep 2026
- 2026Earth Observation Foundation Models for Terrestrial Ecohydrology: From Representation Learning to Process Inference15 Aug 2026
- 2026Earth Science Foundation Models: From Perception to Reasoning and Discovery9 May 2026
- 2026Agentic AI for Remote Sensing: Technical Challenges and Research Directions27 Apr 2026
- 2026SIGMAE: A Spectral-Index-Guided Foundation Model for Multispectral Remote Sensing8 Mar 2026
- 2026THOR: A Versatile Foundation Model for Earth Observation Climate and Society Applications22 Jan 2026
- 2025Thinking on Maps: How Foundation Model Agents Explore, Remember, and Reason Map Environments30 Dec 2025
- 2025FUSE-RSVLM: Feature Fusion Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing30 Dec 2025
- 2025Any-Optical-Model: A Universal Foundation Model for Optical Remote Sensing19 Dec 2025
- 2025AMD-HookNet++: Evolution of AMD-HookNet with Hybrid CNN-Transformer Feature Enhancement for Glacier Calving Front Segmentation16 Dec 2025
- 2025RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation4 Dec 2025
12 more
- 2025Landslide Hazard Mapping with Geospatial Foundation Models: Geographical Generalizability, Data Scarcity, and Band Adaptability6 Nov 2025
- 2025Survey of Multimodal Geospatial Foundation Models: Techniques, Applications, and Challenges27 Oct 2025
- 2025GeoLink: Empowering Remote Sensing Foundation Model with OpenStreetMap Data30 Sep 2025
- 2025MAESTRO: Masked AutoEncoders for Multimodal, Multitemporal, and Multispectral Earth Observation Data14 Aug 2025
- 2025ChatENV: An Interactive Vision-Language Model for Sensor-Guided Environmental Monitoring and Scenario Simulation14 Aug 2025
- 2025BioAnalyst: A Foundation Model for Biodiversity11 Jul 2025
- 2025TESSERA: Temporal Embeddings of Surface Spectra for Earth Representation and Analysis25 Jun 2025
- 2025Atomizer: Generalizing to new modalities by breaking satellite images down to a set of scalars16 Jun 2025
- 2025Geospatial Foundation Models to Enable Progress on Sustainable Development Goals30 May 2025
- 2025CLDTracker: A Comprehensive Language Description for Visual Tracking29 May 2025
- 2025Spatial-Temporal-Spectral Unified Modeling for Remote Sensing Dense Prediction18 May 2025
- 2025CARL: Camera-Agnostic Representation Learning for Spectral Image Analysis27 Apr 2025
- 2025TESSERA: Temporal Embeddings of Surface Spectra for Earth Representation and Analysiscited by 39
- 2025Geospatial Foundation Models to Enable Progress on Sustainable Development Goalscited by 10
- 2025GeoLink: Empowering Remote Sensing Foundation Model with OpenStreetMap Datacited by 8
- 2026THOR: A Versatile Foundation Model for Earth Observation Climate and Society Applicationscited by 7
- 2025RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observationcited by 4
- 2025Survey of Multimodal Geospatial Foundation Models: Techniques, Applications, and Challengescited by 3
- 2025Any-Optical-Model: A Universal Foundation Model for Optical Remote Sensingcited by 3
- 2025CARL: Camera-Agnostic Representation Learning for Spectral Image Analysiscited by 2
- 2025CLDTracker: A Comprehensive Language Description for Visual Trackingcited by 2
- 2025MAESTRO: Masked AutoEncoders for Multimodal, Multitemporal, and Multispectral Earth Observation Datacited by 2
- 2025Atomizer: Generalizing to new modalities by breaking satellite images down to a set of scalarscited by 1
- 2025Landslide Hazard Mapping with Geospatial Foundation Models: Geographical Generalizability, Data Scarcity, and Band Adaptabilitycited by 1
12 most cited of 20 All 20 (JSON)
- 2026Atomizer-IO: Beyond Pixels, Patches and Grids30 Sep 2026
- 2026VesselBench-800K: A Large-scale Perception Benchmark for Multimodal Vessel Detection, Counting, and Density Estimation29 Sep 2026
- 2026Earth Observation Foundation Models for Terrestrial Ecohydrology: From Representation Learning to Process Inference15 Aug 2026
- 2026Earth Science Foundation Models: From Perception to Reasoning and Discovery9 May 2026
- 2026SIGMAE: A Spectral-Index-Guided Foundation Model for Multispectral Remote Sensing8 Mar 2026
- 2026THOR: A Versatile Foundation Model for Earth Observation Climate and Society Applications22 Jan 2026
- 2025Any-Optical-Model: A Universal Foundation Model for Optical Remote Sensing19 Dec 2025
- 2025AMD-HookNet++: Evolution of AMD-HookNet with Hybrid CNN-Transformer Feature Enhancement for Glacier Calving Front Segmentation16 Dec 2025
- 2025RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation4 Dec 2025
- 2025Landslide Hazard Mapping with Geospatial Foundation Models: Geographical Generalizability, Data Scarcity, and Band Adaptability6 Nov 2025
- 2025Survey of Multimodal Geospatial Foundation Models: Techniques, Applications, and Challenges27 Oct 2025
- 2025GeoLink: Empowering Remote Sensing Foundation Model with OpenStreetMap Data30 Sep 2025
12 newest of 20 All 20 (JSON)