# OmniEarth: A Benchmark for Evaluating Vision-Language Models in Geospatial Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09471 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09471/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 46 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)
- 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 46)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11029/) (2023)
- [AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05167/) (2016)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [Functional Map of the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07846/) (2017)
- [GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15826/) (2023)
- [RSGPT: A Remote Sensing Vision Language Model and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15266/) (2023)
- [RSVQA: Visual Question Answering for Remote Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07333/) (2020)
- [EarthGPT: A Universal Multi-modal Large Language Model for Multi-sensor Image Comprehension in Remote Sensing Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16822/) (2024)
- [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)
- [FAIR1M: A Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Object Recognition in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05569/) (2021)
- [OmniVL:One Foundation Model for Image-Language and Video-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07526/) (2022)
- [xBD: A Dataset for Assessing Building Damage from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09296/) (2019)
- [LHRS-Bot: Empowering Remote Sensing with VGI-Enhanced Large Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02544/) (2024)
- [SkyScript: A Large and Semantically Diverse Vision-Language Dataset for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12856/) (2023)
- [VRSBench: A Versatile Vision-Language Benchmark Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12384/) (2024)
- [SkyEyeGPT: Unifying Remote Sensing Vision-Language Tasks via Instruction Tuning with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09712/) (2024)
- [SkySenseGPT: A Fine-Grained Instruction Tuning Dataset and Model for Remote Sensing Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10100/) (2024)
- [VHM: Versatile and Honest Vision Language Model for Remote Sensing Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20213/) (2024)
- [ILLUME: Illuminating Your LLMs to See, Draw, and Self-Enhance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06673/) (2024)
- [Vision Foundation Models in Remote Sensing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03464/) (2024)
- [EarthVQA: Towards Queryable Earth via Relational Reasoning-Based Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12222/) (2023)
- [GEOBench-VLM: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Geospatial Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19325/) (2024)
- [GeoLLaVA-8K: Scaling Remote-Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models to 8K Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21375/) (2025)
- [BRIGHT: A globally distributed multimodal building damage assessment dataset with very-high-resolution for all-weather disaster response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06019/) (2025)
- [RemoteSAM: Towards Segment Anything for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18022/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [LithoBench: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Remote-Sensing Lithology Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07640/) (2026)
- [SkyNative: A Native Multimodal Architecture for Remote Sensing Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17949/) (2026)
- [RRS-10K: A Multitask Vision-Language Model Benchmark for Rare Remote Sensing Image Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24810/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated effective perception and reasoning capabilities on general-domain tasks, leading to growing interest in their application to Earth observation. However, a systematic benchmark for comprehensively evaluating remote sensing vision-language models (RSVLMs) remains lacking. To address this gap, we introduce OmniEarth, a benchmark for evaluating RSVLMs under realistic Earth observation scenarios. OmniEarth organizes tasks along three capability dimensions: perception, reasoning, and robustness. It defines 28 fine-grained tasks covering multi-source sensing data and diverse geospatial contexts. The benchmark supports two task formulations: multiple-choice VQA and open-ended VQA. The latter includes pure text outputs for captioning tasks, bounding box outputs for visual grounding tasks, and mask outputs for segmentation tasks. To reduce linguistic bias and examine whether model predictions rely on visual evidence, OmniEarth adopts a blind test protocol and a quintuple semantic consistency requirement. OmniEarth includes 9,275 carefully quality-controlled images, including proprietary satellite imagery from Jilin-1 (JL-1), along with 44,210 manually verified instructions. We conduct a systematic evaluation of contrastive learning-based models, general closed-source and open-source VLMs, as well as RSVLMs. Results show that existing VLMs still struggle with geospatially complex tasks, revealing clear gaps that need to be addressed for remote sensing applications. OmniEarth is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/sjeeudd/OmniEarth.