# ReLATE: Reliability-Guided Evidence Fusion for Robust UAV--Satellite cross-view Geo-Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25524 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25524/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Multi-Similarity Loss with General Pair Weighting for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06627/) (2019)
- [Two at Once: Enhancing Learning and Generalization Capacities via IBN-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09441/) (2018)
- [Wide-Area Image Geolocalization with Aerial Reference Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03743/) (2015)
- [TransGeo: Transformer Is All You Need for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00097/) (2022)
- [University-1652: A Multi-view Multi-source Benchmark for Drone-based Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12186/) (2020)
- [Sample4Geo: Hard Negative Sampling For Cross-View Geo-Localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11851/) (2023)
- [Each Part Matters: Local Patterns Facilitate Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11646/) (2020)
- [SUES-200: A Multi-height Multi-scene Cross-view Image Benchmark Across Drone and Satellite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10704/) (2022)
- [A Transformer-Based Feature Segmentation and Region Alignment Method For UAV-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09206/) (2022)
- [Towards Natural Language-Guided Drones: GeoText-1652 Benchmark with Spatial Relation Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12751/) (2023)
- [Multiple-environment Self-adaptive Network for Aerial-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08381/) (2022)
- [SDPL: Shifting-Dense Partition Learning for UAV-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04172/) (2024)
- [Learning Cross-view Geo-localization Embeddings via Dynamic Weighted Decorrelation Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05296/) (2022)
- [Video2BEV: Transforming Drone Videos to BEVs for Video-based Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13610/) (2024)
- [Multi-weather Cross-view Geo-localization Using Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02408/) (2024)
- [WeatherPrompt: Multi-modality Representation Learning for All-Weather Drone Visual Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09560/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-satellite cross-view geo-localization matches UAV images against satellite imagery and has achieved impressive accuracy on clean (non-degraded) image benchmarks. In real-world flights, however, UAV observations are frequently affected by adverse weather, illumination changes, platform motion, sensor noise, and compression, while the robustness of existing methods under such degradations remains largely unexamined. In this paper, we present UAVSat-Deg, a large-scale robustness benchmark for degraded UAV-satellite geo-localization, comprising University-1652-Deg and SUES-200-Deg. UAVSat-Deg covers 27 corruption types, including 19 core and 8 compound corruptions, at three severity levels, supports bidirectional drone-to-satellite and satellite-to-drone retrieval as well as multi-height UAV acquisition, and contains more than 11.7 million pre-generated corrupted test images. Benchmarking representative methods under this protocol reveals substantial robustness gaps, particularly under severe and compound corruptions. To address this problem, we propose ReLATE, a Reliable Evidence Learning framework with Adaptive Token Evidence Regulation, which realizes reliability-adaptive feature fusion during descriptor construction. ReLATE estimates a structure-smoothed reliability field over visual tokens, aggregates trustworthy local evidence, and adaptively integrates it into query-derived representations; the regulated query representations are then combined with the CLS-token and GeM-pooled branches to form the final cross-view descriptor. Across both test sets and retrieval directions, ReLATE achieves the best average corrupted-test performance among the compared methods while maintaining competitive accuracy on clean images. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/JHC626/ReLATE.