# Geospatial-Reasoning-Driven Vocabulary-Agnostic Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08206 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08206/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [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)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08733/) (2021)
- [CAT-Seg: Cost Aggregation for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11797/) (2023)
- [Land-Cover Classification with High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Using Transferable Deep Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05713/) (2018)
- [Exploring Efficient Open-Vocabulary Segmentation in the Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12040/) (2025)
- [SegEarth-OV: Towards Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation for Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01768/) (2024)
- [Towards Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19492/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation has become an important direction in remote sensing, as it enables recognition beyond predefined land-cover categories. However, existing methods mainly depend on passive visual-text matching and often struggle with semantic ambiguity in geographically complex scenes, especially when different classes exhibit similar spectral or structural patterns. To address this issue, we propose a Geospatial Reasoning Chain-of-Thought (GR-CoT) framework for remote sensing open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. GR-CoT consists of an offline knowledge distillation stream and an online instance reasoning stream. The former constructs category interpretation standards for confusing classes, while the latter performs macro-scenario anchoring, visual feature decoupling, and knowledge-driven decision synthesis to generate an image-adaptive vocabulary for downstream segmentation. Experiments on the LoveDA and GID5 benchmarks indicate that the proposed framework improves overall segmentation performance and yields more semantically coherent predictions in complex scenes.