# Filling Before Advancing: Capability-Gap-Driven Post-Training for Scenario-Specialized Remote Sensing MLLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22205 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22205/

## 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 31 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 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 31)

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- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Experience Replay for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11682/) (2018)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11029/) (2023)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15826/) (2023)
- [MME-RealWorld: Could Your Multimodal LLM Challenge High-Resolution Real-World Scenarios that are Difficult for Humans?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13257/) (2024)
- [BigEarthNet: A Large-Scale Benchmark Archive For Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06148/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Exploring Models and Data for Remote Sensing Image Caption Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07835/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [SkySenseGPT: A Fine-Grained Instruction Tuning Dataset and Model for Remote Sensing Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10100/) (2024)
- [SEN12MS -- A Curated Dataset of Georeferenced Multi-Spectral Sentinel-1/2 Imagery for Deep Learning and Data Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07789/) (2019)
- [VHM: Versatile and Honest Vision Language Model for Remote Sensing Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20213/) (2024)
- [EarthDial: Turning Multi-sensory Earth Observations to Interactive Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15190/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning Meets SAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10027/) (2020)
- [LHRS-Bot-Nova: Improved Multimodal Large Language Model for Remote Sensing Vision-Language Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09301/) (2024)
- [ChatEarthNet: A Global-Scale Image-Text Dataset Empowering Vision-Language Geo-Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11325/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote sensing multimodal large language models (RS-MLLMs) have advanced aerial-image understanding, but scenario specialization remains constrained by scarce high-quality supervision and incomplete capability coverage. We propose filling before advancing (FBA), a capability-gap-driven post-training route that develops prerequisite capabilities before scenario-specific adaptation. For coastal harbor understanding, we construct CPRS (Coastal-Port Remote Sensing), a three-layer dataset covering RGB, SAR, PAN, and NIR imagery. FBA organizes supervision into RS semantic anchoring, multi-source bridging, and evidence-grounded scenario tuning. We also introduce HarborEval, an eight-track benchmark assessing perception, spatial understanding, robustness, and generation. Using the same final-task supervision pool, FBA raises the HarborEval score from 57.95 to 70.29 on LLaVA-v1.5 and from 81.09 to 83.37 on Qwen3-VL compared with Direct-SFT. It also outperforms collapsed training and leads the evaluated comparisons on harbor-related VRSBench and RSVQA subsets and expert-scored OpenEval. Stage-wise and supervision-replacement analyses examine the contributions of the supervision roles. A lightweight urban instantiation further supports cross-scenario applicability, with the proposed stage order achieving stronger overall performance than the tested alternatives. Project resources and release updates are available at https://github.com/Z0ngL1ng/filling-before-advancing.