UniTS: Unified Spatio-Temporal Generative Model for Remote Sensing
On the map: Diffusion models → Inverse problems and image restoration
Abstract (arXiv)
One of the primary objectives of satellite remote sensing is to capture the complex dynamics of the Earth environment, which encompasses tasks such as reconstructing continuous cloud-free image sequences, detecting land cover changes, and forecasting future surface evolution. However, existing methods typically require specialized models tailored to different tasks, and lack a general framework that can address these multi-level tasks from a unified perspective. In this paper, we propose a Unified Spatio-Temporal Generative Model (UniTS), which integrates several long-separated core tasks, including time series reconstruction, time series cloud removal, time series semantic change detection, and time series forecasting. Based on the flow matching generative paradigm, UniTS constructs a deterministic evolution path from noise to targets under the guidance of task-specific conditions, achieving unified modeling of spatiotemporal representations for multi-level tasks. The UniTS architecture consists of a diffusion transformer with spatiotemporal blocks, where we design an Adaptive Condition Injector (ACor) to enhance the model's conditional perception of multimodal inputs, enabling high-quality controllable generation. Additionally, we design a Spatiotemporal-aware Modulator (STM) to improve the ability of spatiotemporal blocks to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies. It substantially outperforms existing specialized models, particularly under challenging conditions such as severe cloud contamination, modality absence, and forecasting complex phenological variations.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 37 of its 46 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2025.
Builds on
37 of 46 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Effective Cloud Removal for Remote Sensing Images by an Improved Mean-Reverting Denoising Model with Elucidated Design Space31 Mar
- 2025SeedVR: Seeding Infinity in Diffusion Transformer Towards Generic Video Restoration2 Jan
Other references · 35
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 8,964
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 5,931
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,426
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- 2022MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Modelcited by 768
- 2024SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformerscited by 707
- 2024Latte: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Video Generationcited by 536
- 2022Scale-MAE: A Scale-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multiscale Geospatial Representation Learningcited by 302
- 2022VRT: A Video Restoration Transformercited by 219
- 2023SkySense: A Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Foundation Model Towards Universal Interpretation for Earth Observation Imagerycited by 202
23 more
- 2021PredRNN: A Recurrent Neural Network for Spatiotemporal Predictive Learningcited by 181
- 2025History-Guided Video Diffusioncited by 165
- 2021Panoptic Segmentation of Satellite Image Time Series with Convolutional Temporal Attention Networkscited by 141
- 2025Long-Context Autoregressive Video Modeling with Next-Frame Predictioncited by 119
- 2024Rethinking Transformers Pre-training for Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagerycited by 82
- 2022DynamicEarthNet: Daily Multi-Spectral Satellite Dataset for Semantic Change Segmentationcited by 78
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- 2024Progressive Autoregressive Video Diffusion Modelscited by 65
- 2021The Multi-Temporal Urban Development SpaceNet Datasetcited by 62
- 2023ViTs for SITS: Vision Transformers for Satellite Image Time Seriescited by 55
- 2024LARP: Tokenizing Videos with a Learned Autoregressive Generative Priorcited by 46
- 2022Joint Spatio-Temporal Modeling for the Semantic Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagescited by 43
- 2021EarthNet2021: A large-scale dataset and challenge for Earth surface forecasting as a guided video prediction taskcited by 34
- 2022SEN12MS-CR-TS: A Remote Sensing Data Set for Multi-modal Multi-temporal Cloud Removalcited by 32
- 2023UnCRtainTS: Uncertainty Quantification for Cloud Removal in Optical Satellite Time Seriescited by 28
- 2025VideoScene: Distilling Video Diffusion Model to Generate 3D Scenes in One Stepcited by 27
- 2022SimVPv2: Towards Simple yet Powerful Spatiotemporal Predictive Learningcited by 20
- 2023Multi-modal learning for geospatial vegetation forecastingcited by 16
- 2024Long Video Diffusion Generation with Segmented Cross-Attention and Content-Rich Video Data Curationcited by 12
- 2023U-TILISE: A Sequence-to-sequence Model for Cloud Removal in Optical Satellite Time Seriescited by 8
- 2024AllClear: A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Cloud Removal in Satellite Imagerycited by 7
- 2022STAU: A SpatioTemporal-Aware Unit for Video Prediction and Beyondcited by 2
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
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- 2025Environment-Aware Satellite Image Generation with Diffusion Models
- 2025Spatiotemporal Satellite Image Downscaling with Transfer Encoders and Autoregressive Generative Models
- 2026RS-WorldModel: a Unified Model for Remote Sensing Understanding and Future Sense Forecasting
- 2026ChangeFlow -- Latent Rectified Flow for Change Detection in Remote Sensing