# Geospatial Chain of Thought Reasoning for Enhanced Visual Question Answering on Satellite Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11198 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11198/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 12 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11029/) (2023)
- [GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15826/) (2023)
- [EarthDial: Turning Multi-sensory Earth Observations to Interactive Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15190/) (2024)
- [Wildfire Detection Via Transfer Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12276/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Geospatial chain of thought (CoT) reasoning is essential for advancing Visual Question Answering (VQA) on satellite imagery, particularly in climate related applications such as disaster monitoring, infrastructure risk assessment, urban resilience planning, and policy support. Existing VQA models enable scalable interpretation of remote sensing data but often lack the structured reasoning required for complex geospatial queries. We propose a VQA framework that integrates CoT reasoning with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to improve interpretability, robustness, and accuracy. By generating intermediate rationales, the model better handles tasks involving detection, classification, spatial relations, and comparative analysis, which are critical for reliable decision support in high stakes climate domains. Experiments show that CoT supervision improves accuracy by 34.9% over direct baselines, while DPO yields additional gains in accuracy and reasoning quality. The resulting system advances VQA for multispectral Earth observation by enabling richer geospatial reasoning and more effective climate use cases.