Text Before Vision: Staged Knowledge Injection Matters for Agentic RLVR in Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Understanding
On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning
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Abstract (arXiv)
Multimodal reasoning for ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing (RS) is usually bottlenecked by visual evidence acquisition: the model necessitates localizing tiny task-relevant regions in massive pixel spaces. While Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) using zoom-in tools offers a path forward, we find that standard reinforcement learning struggles to navigate these vast visual spaces without structured domain priors. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between post-training paradigms: comparing Cold-start Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), RLVR, and Agentic RLVR on the UHR RS benchmark.Our controlled studies yield a counter-intuitive finding: high-quality Earth-science text-only QA is a primary driver of UHR visual reasoning gains. Despite lacking images, domain-specific text injects the concepts, mechanistic explanations, and decision rules necessary to guide visual evidence retrieval.Based on this, we propose a staged knowledge injection recipe: (1) cold-starting with scalable, knowledge-graph-verified Earth-science text QA to instill reasoning structures;and (2) "pre-warming" on the same hard UHR image-text examples during SFT to stabilize and amplify subsequent tool-based RL. This approach achieves a 60.40% Pass@1 on XLRS-Bench, significantly outperforming larger general purpose models (e.g., GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.0 Pro, Intern-S1) and establishing a new state-of-the-art.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 29 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2026.
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
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- 2026RemoteAgent: Bridging Vague Human Intents and Earth Observation with RL-based Agentic MLLMs9 Apr 2026
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