geospatial ai developers

Abstract: In grounded remote sensing visual question answering, a model produces a textual answer and identifies relevant objects in the image as grounding evidence. Existing evaluations measure answer correctness and localization quality, but do not directly assess answer-grounding consistency. We propose the Answer-Evidence Support Protocol (AESP) to assess this consistency through evidence support: whether the grounding evidence supports the model's own answer. AESP applies task-specific rules to existence, counting, and comparison questions. We further construct the Grounded Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering (G-RSVQA) benchmark, containing 15,027 samples with questions, reference answers, and all related object-level annotations. Experiments on seven grounded vision--language models reveal failures of evidence support across all three question types. Up to 50.82% of correct answers in the evidence evaluation subset are not supported by the provided grounding evidence.

Abstract: Hi-OPD addresses a failure mode left uncontrolled by flat open-prompt training: descendant retrieval need not persist under ancestor queries when multi-source remote sensing annotations exhibit inconsistent granularity and missing labels. A detector may localize \textit{car} and \textit{van} under atomic prompts yet miss the same instances under \textit{vehicle}; flat AP does not expose this cross-level inconsistency. We propose Hi-OPD, a hierarchy-aware open-prompt detector, and construct RS153-HierOPD from 175,644 retained training image/tile records and 3.48M boxes mapped to 153 atomic categories with sparse hierarchy and alias relations. Hi-OPD learns ancestor retrieval through hierarchy-safe negative sampling, path multi-positive supervision, and one-way upward consistency, while per-source risk exclusion handles potentially missing labels. ConvVPE converts K-shot support boxes into text-compatible embeddings using detector-native features and the shared contrastive head. On Track A, Hi-OPD obtains 79.7/72.3 AP50 on DIOR/DOTA-v2.0, above the literature-reported OpenRSD results of 76.7/71.8. Under controlled training on the original converted annotations, the full hierarchy recipe raises DOTA-v2.0 parent AP50 from 7.2 to 71.5 and FAIR1M grandparent AP50 from 31.6 to 71.4, while DOTA-v2.0 atomic AP50 changes from 71.4 to 72.3. The text path reaches 99.7% CAR50 (0.3% violation) across the three common sources and 99.9%/0.1% on FAIR1M grandparent relations. On held-out VEDAI, text AP50 is 75.9, 6.2 points above OpenRSD. Joint AP and CAR show that explicit hierarchy training repairs this failure mode while retaining atomic detection and prompt transfer.