# Multimodal Large Language Models for Remote Sensing Image Understanding: Domain-Specific or General-Purpose?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20284 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20284/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 69 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 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 69)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [SatMAE: Pre-training Transformers for Temporal and Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08051/) (2022)
- [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)
- [GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15826/) (2023)
- [Scale-MAE: A Scale-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multiscale Geospatial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14532/) (2022)
- [SpectralGPT: Spectral Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07113/) (2023)
- [RSGPT: A Remote Sensing Vision Language Model and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15266/) (2023)
- [SkySense: A Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Foundation Model Towards Universal Interpretation for Earth Observation Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10115/) (2023)
- [RSVQA: Visual Question Answering for Remote Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07333/) (2020)
- [LLaVA-Plus: Learning to Use Tools for Creating Multimodal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05437/) (2023)
- [Geography-Aware Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09980/) (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)
- [TinyLLaVA: A Framework of Small-scale Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14289/) (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)
- [Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Towards Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03987/) (2022)
- [Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13130/) (2025)
- [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)
- [An Empirical Study of Remote Sensing Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02825/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has introduced a flexible paradigm for remote sensing image scene understanding (RSISU), enabling natural-language interaction with remote sensing imagery. However, a systematic understanding of the capability boundaries, cross-task generalization, and task-specific limitations of existing remote sensing MLLMs (RS-MLLMs) is still lacking. This paper presents a systematic survey and diagnostic evaluation of MLLMs for RSISU. We review the technical evolution of RS-MLLMs, focusing on model design, multimodal learning, training data, and downstream capabilities. We further compare RS-MLLMs with general-purpose computer vision MLLMs (CV-MLLMs) across diverse RSISU tasks and benchmarks. RS-MLLMs remain competitive in domain-specific settings, particularly remote sensing visual grounding and high-resolution visual question answering. More notably, general-purpose CV-MLLMs can match or even outperform these specialized models on several RSISU tasks without remote sensing-specific fine-tuning. These findings demonstrate the strong transferability of general-purpose CV-MLLMs and show that current RS-MLLMs do not consistently outperform them across diverse RSISU tasks. Current MLLMs also face limitations in spatial and relational reasoning, fine-grained visual understanding, instruction diversity, and generalization across heterogeneous task formats. Based on these findings, we outline future directions toward reliable evaluation, multimodal and high-resolution reasoning, efficient deployment, and tool-augmented remote sensing agents. This survey provides a systematic reference for developing robust, generalizable, and practical MLLMs for RSISU.