# Enabling Training-Free Text-Based Remote Sensing Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17799 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17799/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 76 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [Qwen3-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17765/) (2025)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11029/) (2023)
- [LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02244/) (2021)
- [Side Adapter Network for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12242/) (2023)
- [DeepGlobe 2018: A Challenge to Parse the Earth through Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06561/) (2018)
- [LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08733/) (2021)
- [PixelLM: Pixel Reasoning with Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02228/) (2023)
- [CAT-Seg: Cost Aggregation for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11797/) (2023)
- [iSAID: A Large-scale Dataset for Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12886/) (2019)
- [SpaceNet: A Remote Sensing Dataset and Challenge Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01232/) (2018)
- [SCLIP: Rethinking Self-Attention for Dense Vision-Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01597/) (2023)
- [SegCLIP: Patch Aggregation with Learnable Centers for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14813/) (2022)
- [Reviving Iterative Training with Mask Guidance for Interactive Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06583/) (2021)
- [Sa2VA: Marrying SAM2 with MLLM for Dense Grounded Understanding of Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04001/) (2025)
- [RS5M and GeoRSCLIP: A Large Scale Vision-Language Dataset and A Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11300/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [GeoSelect: Spatial-Program Execution for Training-Free Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03869/) (2026)
- [DiCoR: Decoupled Referent Disambiguation and Contour Recalibration for Efficient Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12980/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have opened new opportunities for zero-shot text-guided segmentation of remote sensing imagery. However, most existing approaches still rely on additional trainable components, limiting their generalisation and practical applicability. In this work, we investigate to what extent text-based remote sensing segmentation can be achieved without additional training, by relying solely on existing foundation models. We propose a simple yet effective approach that integrates contrastive and generative VLMs with the Segment Anything Model (SAM), enabling a fully training-free or lightweight LoRA-tuned pipeline. Our contrastive approach employs CLIP as mask selector for SAM's grid-based proposals, achieving state-of-the-art open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) in a completely zero-shot setting. In parallel, our generative approach enables reasoning and referring segmentation by generating click prompts for SAM using GPT-5 in a zero-shot setting and a LoRA-tuned Qwen-VL model, with the latter yielding the best results. Extensive experiments across 19 remote sensing benchmarks, including open-vocabulary, referring, and reasoning-based tasks, demonstrate the strong capabilities of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/josesosajs/trainfree-rs-segmentation.