Daily Papers

Sketch-based terrain generation seeks to create realistic landscapes for virtual environments in various applications such as computer games, animation and virtual reality. Recently, deep learning based terrain generation has emerged, notably the ones based on generative adversarial networks (GAN). However, these methods often struggle to fulfill the requirements of flexible user control and maintain generative diversity for realistic terrain. Therefore, we propose a novel diffusion-based method, namely terrain diffusion network (TDN), which actively incorporates user guidance for enhanced controllability, taking into account terrain features like rivers, ridges, basins, and peaks. Instead of adhering to a conventional monolithic denoising process, which often compromises the fidelity of terrain details or the alignment with user control, a multi-level denoising scheme is proposed to generate more realistic terrains by taking into account fine-grained details, particularly those related to climatic patterns influenced by erosion and tectonic activities. Specifically, three terrain synthesisers are designed for structural, intermediate, and fine-grained level denoising purposes, which allow each synthesiser concentrate on a distinct terrain aspect. Moreover, to maximise the efficiency of our TDN, we further introduce terrain and sketch latent spaces for the synthesizers with pre-trained terrain autoencoders. Comprehensive experiments on a new dataset constructed from NASA Topology Images clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.

Supervised machine learning methods for geological mapping via remote sensing face limitations due to the scarcity of accurately labelled training data that can be addressed by unsupervised learning, such as dimensionality reduction and clustering. Dimensionality reduction methods have the potential to play a crucial role in improving the accuracy of geological maps. Although conventional dimensionality reduction methods may struggle with nonlinear data, unsupervised deep learning models such as autoencoders can model non-linear relationships. Stacked autoencoders feature multiple interconnected layers to capture hierarchical data representations useful for remote sensing data. We present an unsupervised machine learning-based framework for processing remote sensing data using stacked autoencoders for dimensionality reduction and k-means clustering for mapping geological units. We use Landsat 8, ASTER, and Sentinel-2 datasets to evaluate the framework for geological mapping of the Mutawintji region in Western New South Wales, Australia. We also compare stacked autoencoders with principal component analysis (PCA) and canonical autoencoders. Our results reveal that the framework produces accurate and interpretable geological maps, efficiently discriminating rock units. The results reveal that the combination of stacked autoencoders with Sentinel-2 data yields the best performance accuracy when compared to other combinations. We find that stacked autoencoders enable better extraction of complex and hierarchical representations of the input data when compared to canonical autoencoders and PCA. We also find that the generated maps align with prior geological knowledge of the study area while providing novel insights into geological structures.

Masked autoencoders (MAE) have recently been introduced to 3D self-supervised pretraining for point clouds due to their great success in NLP and computer vision. Unlike MAEs used in the image domain, where the pretext task is to restore features at the masked pixels, such as colors, the existing 3D MAE works reconstruct the missing geometry only, i.e, the location of the masked points. In contrast to previous studies, we advocate that point location recovery is inessential and restoring intrinsic point features is much superior. To this end, we propose to ignore point position reconstruction and recover high-order features at masked points including surface normals and surface variations, through a novel attention-based decoder which is independent of the encoder design. We validate the effectiveness of our pretext task and decoder design using different encoder structures for 3D training and demonstrate the advantages of our pretrained networks on various point cloud analysis tasks.

Neural fields excel in computer vision and robotics due to their ability to understand the 3D visual world such as inferring semantics, geometry, and dynamics. Given the capabilities of neural fields in densely representing a 3D scene from 2D images, we ask the question: Can we scale their self-supervised pretraining, specifically using masked autoencoders, to generate effective 3D representations from posed RGB images. Owing to the astounding success of extending transformers to novel data modalities, we employ standard 3D Vision Transformers to suit the unique formulation of NeRFs. We leverage NeRF's volumetric grid as a dense input to the transformer, contrasting it with other 3D representations such as pointclouds where the information density can be uneven, and the representation is irregular. Due to the difficulty of applying masked autoencoders to an implicit representation, such as NeRF, we opt for extracting an explicit representation that canonicalizes scenes across domains by employing the camera trajectory for sampling. Our goal is made possible by masking random patches from NeRF's radiance and density grid and employing a standard 3D Swin Transformer to reconstruct the masked patches. In doing so, the model can learn the semantic and spatial structure of complete scenes. We pretrain this representation at scale on our proposed curated posed-RGB data, totaling over 1.8 million images. Once pretrained, the encoder is used for effective 3D transfer learning. Our novel self-supervised pretraining for NeRFs, NeRF-MAE, scales remarkably well and improves performance on various challenging 3D tasks. Utilizing unlabeled posed 2D data for pretraining, NeRF-MAE significantly outperforms self-supervised 3D pretraining and NeRF scene understanding baselines on Front3D and ScanNet datasets with an absolute performance improvement of over 20% AP50 and 8% AP25 for 3D object detection.

Self-supervised pre-training bears potential to generate expressive representations without human annotation. Most pre-training in Earth observation (EO) are based on ImageNet or medium-size, labeled remote sensing (RS) datasets. We share an unlabeled RS dataset SSL4EO-S12 (Self-Supervised Learning for Earth Observation - Sentinel-1/2) to assemble a large-scale, global, multimodal, and multi-seasonal corpus of satellite imagery from the ESA Sentinel-1 \& -2 satellite missions. For EO applications we demonstrate SSL4EO-S12 to succeed in self-supervised pre-training for a set of methods: MoCo-v2, DINO, MAE, and data2vec. Resulting models yield downstream performance close to, or surpassing accuracy measures of supervised learning. In addition, pre-training on SSL4EO-S12 excels compared to existing datasets. We make openly available the dataset, related source code, and pre-trained models at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/SSL4EO-S12.

Masked autoencoding has become a successful pretraining paradigm for Transformer models for text, images, and, recently, point clouds. Raw automotive datasets are suitable candidates for self-supervised pre-training as they generally are cheap to collect compared to annotations for tasks like 3D object detection (OD). However, the development of masked autoencoders for point clouds has focused solely on synthetic and indoor data. Consequently, existing methods have tailored their representations and models toward small and dense point clouds with homogeneous point densities. In this work, we study masked autoencoding for point clouds in an automotive setting, which are sparse and for which the point density can vary drastically among objects in the same scene. To this end, we propose Voxel-MAE, a simple masked autoencoding pre-training scheme designed for voxel representations. We pre-train the backbone of a Transformer-based 3D object detector to reconstruct masked voxels and to distinguish between empty and non-empty voxels. Our method improves the 3D OD performance by 1.75 mAP points and 1.05 NDS on the challenging nuScenes dataset. Further, we show that by pre-training with Voxel-MAE, we require only 40% of the annotated data to outperform a randomly initialized equivalent. Code available at https://github.com/georghess/voxel-mae

We present the NCS-models, a family of seismic foundation models pretrained on a large share of full-stack seismic cubes from the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) available through the public DISKOS database. The model weights are open-sourced for the wider geoscience community. Foundation models trained with large-scale self-supervision are emerging as a promising basis for automatic seismic interpretation. However, most existing seismic models rely on limited or proprietary datasets, and it remains unclear how well natural-image foundation models transfer to seismic data. Our goals are to develop basin-scale seismic foundation models, provide practical recipes for scalable 3D training, and quantify the effects of basin-targeted pretraining and token dimensionality on downstream interpretation performance. Using masked autoencoders with Vision Transformer backbones, we pretrain models on a DISKOS-derived corpus of 3D time- and depth-migrated seismic volumes. The NCS-model variants use 2D, 2.5D multi-view, and 3D tokenization within a matched training setup. Transfer is evaluated on interpretation benchmarks using frozen backbones and a simple k-nearest neighbor classifier. Baselines include an ImageNet-pretrained MAE, a frontier vision foundation model, and a globally pretrained seismic model. Natural-image pretrained models do not reliably transfer, reflecting the large domain gap between natural images and seismic data. Seismic pretraining is necessary for robust transfer, and large-scale basin-targeted pretraining yields further gains over a smaller globally pretrained seismic baseline. The NCS-models achieve the best overall performance without fine-tuning, while 2.5D tokenization offers the strongest accuracy-efficiency tradeoff and the embeddings support similarity search for interactive interpretation.

Significant progress in the development of highly adaptable and reusable Artificial Intelligence (AI) models is expected to have a significant impact on Earth science and remote sensing. Foundation models are pre-trained on large unlabeled datasets through self-supervision, and then fine-tuned for various downstream tasks with small labeled datasets. This paper introduces a first-of-a-kind framework for the efficient pre-training and fine-tuning of foundational models on extensive geospatial data. We have utilized this framework to create Prithvi, a transformer-based geospatial foundational model pre-trained on more than 1TB of multispectral satellite imagery from the Harmonized Landsat-Sentinel 2 (HLS) dataset. Our study demonstrates the efficacy of our framework in successfully fine-tuning Prithvi to a range of Earth observation tasks that have not been tackled by previous work on foundation models involving multi-temporal cloud gap imputation, flood mapping, wildfire scar segmentation, and multi-temporal crop segmentation. Our experiments show that the pre-trained model accelerates the fine-tuning process compared to leveraging randomly initialized weights. In addition, pre-trained Prithvi compares well against the state-of-the-art, e.g., outperforming a conditional GAN model in multi-temporal cloud imputation by up to 5pp (or 5.7%) in the structural similarity index. Finally, due to the limited availability of labeled data in the field of Earth observation, we gradually reduce the quantity of available labeled data for refining the model to evaluate data efficiency and demonstrate that data can be decreased significantly without affecting the model's accuracy. The pre-trained 100 million parameter model and corresponding fine-tuning workflows have been released publicly as open source contributions to the global Earth sciences community through Hugging Face.

Recent research in geospatial machine learning demonstrates that models pretrained with self-supervised learning on Earth observation data can perform well on downstream tasks with limited labeled data. However, most benchmark datasets have few data modalities and poor global representation, limiting the ability to evaluate multimodal pretrained models at global scales. In order to fill this gap, we introduce MMEarth-Bench, a collection of five new environmental tasks with 12 modalities, globally distributed data, and both random and geographic test splits. We benchmark a diverse set of pretrained models and find that while (multimodal) pretraining tends to improve model robustness in limited data settings, geographic generalization abilities remain poor. Moreover, a simple randomly initialized multimodal model is competitive given enough labeled data. Although data is abundant, models can currently only make use of the modalities on which they were pretrained. To solve this problem, we propose using all the modalities available at test time as auxiliary tasks for test-time adaptation. Our model-agnostic method for test-time training with multimodal reconstruction (TTT-MMR) can improve performance across all models and tasks on both test splits. Furthermore, geographic batching leads to a good trade-off between regularization and specialization during TTT, which is especially beneficial for long-tail distributions. Our dataset, code, and visualization tool are linked on the project page: lgordon99.github.io/mmearth-bench.

Accumulating substantial volumes of real-world driving data proves pivotal in the realm of trajectory forecasting for autonomous driving. Given the heavy reliance of current trajectory forecasting models on data-driven methodologies, we aim to tackle the challenge of learning general trajectory forecasting representations under limited data availability. We propose a pipeline-level solution to mitigate the issue of data scarcity in trajectory forecasting. The solution is composed of two parts: firstly, we adopt HD map augmentation and trajectory synthesis for generating driving data, and then we learn representations by pre-training on them. Specifically, we apply vector transformations to reshape the maps, and then employ a rule-based model to generate trajectories on both original and augmented scenes; thus enlarging the driving data without collecting additional real ones. To foster the learning of general representations within this augmented dataset, we comprehensively explore the different pre-training strategies, including extending the concept of a Masked AutoEncoder (MAE) for trajectory forecasting. Without bells and whistles, our proposed pipeline-level solution is general, simple, yet effective: we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our data expansion and pre-training strategies, which outperform the baseline prediction model by large margins, e.g. 5.04%, 3.84% and 8.30% in terms of MR_6, minADE_6 and minFDE_6. The pre-training dataset and the codes for pre-training and fine-tuning are released at https://github.com/yhli123/Pretraining_on_Synthetic_Driving_Data_for_Trajectory_Prediction.

The volume of unlabelled Earth observation (EO) data is huge, but many important applications lack labelled training data. However, EO data offers the unique opportunity to pair data from different modalities and sensors automatically based on geographic location and time, at virtually no human labor cost. We seize this opportunity to create MMEarth, a diverse multi-modal pretraining dataset at global scale. Using this new corpus of 1.2 million locations, we propose a Multi-Pretext Masked Autoencoder (MP-MAE) approach to learn general-purpose representations for optical satellite images. Our approach builds on the ConvNeXt V2 architecture, a fully convolutional masked autoencoder (MAE). Drawing upon a suite of multi-modal pretext tasks, we demonstrate that our MP-MAE approach outperforms both MAEs pretrained on ImageNet and MAEs pretrained on domain-specific satellite images. This is shown on several downstream tasks including image classification and semantic segmentation. We find that pretraining with multi-modal pretext tasks notably improves the linear probing performance compared to pretraining on optical satellite images only. This also leads to better label efficiency and parameter efficiency which are crucial aspects in global scale applications.

Recent generative approaches to geometry estimation adapt pretrained image diffusion models and treat the task as image-conditioned generation. Leveraging off-the-shelf image diffusion models, they either (i) train task-specific geometry models (for depth and surface normal estimation) independently, losing the opportunity of exploring the intrinsic correlation of these geometric targets, or (ii) jointly fine-tune modified image diffusion backbones (e.g., altered self-attention), which typically demands substantial labeled data. To overcome these limitations in a principled fashion, we repurpose pretrained video generative models as a unified and data-efficient framework for geometry estimation, formulated innovatively as a next-frames prediction task. Our method, GeoNeXt, inherits naturally structured knowledge and richer priors from the video model, while further adapting them for joint modeling of images and geometry targets (image <-> geometry), enabling more data efficient and effective learning of geometry. Extensive experiments validate our method for zero-shot monocular depth and surface normal estimation across diverse datasets, outperforming both previous task-specific and unified generative competitors while using substantially less training data. Notably, our method rivals discriminative state-of-the-art approaches trained on over 100x more data and even standouts on several benchmarks.

We introduce methods for obtaining pretrained Geometric Neural Operators (GNPs) that can serve as basal foundation models for use in obtaining geometric features. These can be used within data processing pipelines for machine learning tasks and numerical methods. We show how our GNPs can be trained to learn robust latent representations for the differential geometry of point-clouds to provide estimates of metric, curvature, and other shape-related features. We demonstrate how our pre-trained GNPs can be used (i) to estimate the geometric properties of surfaces of arbitrary shape and topologies with robustness in the presence of noise, (ii) to approximate solutions of geometric partial differential equations (PDEs) on manifolds, and (iii) to solve equations for shape deformations such as curvature driven flows. We release codes and weights for using GNPs in the package geo_neural_op. This allows for incorporating our pre-trained GNPs as components for reuse within existing and new data processing pipelines. The GNPs also can be used as part of numerical solvers involving geometry or as part of methods for performing inference and other geometric tasks.

Foundation models have reshaped the landscape of Remote Sensing (RS) by enhancing various image interpretation tasks. Pretraining is an active research topic, encompassing supervised and self-supervised learning methods to initialize model weights effectively. However, transferring the pretrained models to downstream tasks may encounter task discrepancy due to their formulation of pretraining as image classification or object discrimination tasks. In this study, we explore the Multi-Task Pretraining (MTP) paradigm for RS foundation models to address this issue. Using a shared encoder and task-specific decoder architecture, we conduct multi-task supervised pretraining on the SAMRS dataset, encompassing semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and rotated object detection. MTP supports both convolutional neural networks and vision transformer foundation models with over 300 million parameters. The pretrained models are finetuned on various RS downstream tasks, such as scene classification, horizontal and rotated object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. Extensive experiments across 14 datasets demonstrate the superiority of our models over existing ones of similar size and their competitive performance compared to larger state-of-the-art models, thus validating the effectiveness of MTP.

As a promising scheme of self-supervised learning, masked autoencoding has significantly advanced natural language processing and computer vision. Inspired by this, we propose a neat scheme of masked autoencoders for point cloud self-supervised learning, addressing the challenges posed by point cloud's properties, including leakage of location information and uneven information density. Concretely, we divide the input point cloud into irregular point patches and randomly mask them at a high ratio. Then, a standard Transformer based autoencoder, with an asymmetric design and a shifting mask tokens operation, learns high-level latent features from unmasked point patches, aiming to reconstruct the masked point patches. Extensive experiments show that our approach is efficient during pre-training and generalizes well on various downstream tasks. Specifically, our pre-trained models achieve 85.18% accuracy on ScanObjectNN and 94.04% accuracy on ModelNet40, outperforming all the other self-supervised learning methods. We show with our scheme, a simple architecture entirely based on standard Transformers can surpass dedicated Transformer models from supervised learning. Our approach also advances state-of-the-art accuracies by 1.5%-2.3% in the few-shot object classification. Furthermore, our work inspires the feasibility of applying unified architectures from languages and images to the point cloud.

This work presents a new dataset for the Martian digital elevation model prediction task, ready for machine learning applications called MCTED. The dataset has been generated using a comprehensive pipeline designed to process high-resolution Mars orthoimage and DEM pairs from Day et al., yielding a dataset consisting of 80,898 data samples. The source images are data gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using the CTX instrument, providing a very diverse and comprehensive coverage of the Martian surface. Given the complexity of the processing pipelines used in large-scale DEMs, there are often artefacts and missing data points in the original data, for which we developed tools to solve or mitigate their impact. We divide the processed samples into training and validation splits, ensuring samples in both splits cover no mutual areas to avoid data leakage. Every sample in the dataset is represented by the optical image patch, DEM patch, and two mask patches, indicating values that were originally missing or were altered by us. This allows future users of the dataset to handle altered elevation regions as they please. We provide statistical insights of the generated dataset, including the spatial distribution of samples, the distributions of elevation values, slopes and more. Finally, we train a small U-Net architecture on the MCTED dataset and compare its performance to a monocular depth estimation foundation model, DepthAnythingV2, on the task of elevation prediction. We find that even a very small architecture trained on this dataset specifically, beats a zero-shot performance of a depth estimation foundation model like DepthAnythingV2. We make the dataset and code used for its generation completely open source in public repositories.

Nowadays, pre-training big models on large-scale datasets has become a crucial topic in deep learning. The pre-trained models with high representation ability and transferability achieve a great success and dominate many downstream tasks in natural language processing and 2D vision. However, it is non-trivial to promote such a pretraining-tuning paradigm to the 3D vision, given the limited training data that are relatively inconvenient to collect. In this paper, we provide a new perspective of leveraging pre-trained 2D knowledge in 3D domain to tackle this problem, tuning pre-trained image models with the novel Point-to-Pixel prompting for point cloud analysis at a minor parameter cost. Following the principle of prompting engineering, we transform point clouds into colorful images with geometry-preserved projection and geometry-aware coloring to adapt to pre-trained image models, whose weights are kept frozen during the end-to-end optimization of point cloud analysis tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that cooperating with our proposed Point-to-Pixel Prompting, better pre-trained image model will lead to consistently better performance in 3D vision. Enjoying prosperous development from image pre-training field, our method attains 89.3% accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN, surpassing conventional point cloud models with much fewer trainable parameters. Our framework also exhibits very competitive performance on ModelNet classification and ShapeNet Part Segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/P2P.

The computer vision domain has greatly benefited from an abundance of data across many modalities to improve on various visual tasks. Recently, there has been a lot of focus on self-supervised pre-training methods through Masked Autoencoders (MAE) he2022masked,bachmann2022multimae, usually used as a first step before optimizing for a downstream task, such as classification or regression. This is very useful as it doesn't require any manually labeled data. In this work, we introduce Probabilistic Hyper-Graphs using Masked Autoencoders (PHG-MAE): a novel model that unifies the classical work on neural graphs leordeanu2021semi with the modern approach of masked autoencoders under a common theoretical framework. Through random masking of entire modalities, not just patches, the model samples from the distribution of hyper-edges on each forward pass. Additionally, the model adapts the standard MAE algorithm by combining pre-training and fine-tuning into a single training loop. Moreover, our approach enables the creation of inference-time ensembles which, through aggregation, boost the final prediction performance and consistency. Lastly, we show that we can apply knowledge distillation on top of the ensembles with little loss in performance, even with models that have fewer than 1M parameters. While our work mostly focuses on outdoor UAV scenes that contain multiple world interpretations and modalities, the same steps can be followed in other similar domains, such as autonomous driving or indoor robotics. In order to streamline the process of integrating external pre-trained experts for computer vision multi-modal multi-task learning (MTL) scenarios, we developed a data-pipeline software. Using this tool, we have created and released a fully-automated extension of the Dronescapes dataset. All the technical details, code and reproduction steps are publicly released.

This paper introduces a novel hierarchical autoencoder that maps 3D models into a highly compressed latent space. The hierarchical autoencoder is specifically designed to tackle the challenges arising from large-scale datasets and generative modeling using diffusion. Different from previous approaches that only work on a regular image or volume grid, our hierarchical autoencoder operates on unordered sets of vectors. Each level of the autoencoder controls different geometric levels of detail. We show that the model can be used to represent a wide range of 3D models while faithfully representing high-resolution geometry details. The training of the new architecture takes 0.70x time and 0.58x memory compared to the baseline. We also explore how the new representation can be used for generative modeling. Specifically, we propose a cascaded diffusion framework where each stage is conditioned on the previous stage. Our design extends existing cascaded designs for image and volume grids to vector sets.

Recent advances in unsupervised learning have demonstrated the ability of large vision models to achieve promising results on downstream tasks by pre-training on large amount of unlabelled data. Such pre-training techniques have also been explored recently in the remote sensing domain due to the availability of large amount of unlabelled data. Different from standard natural image datasets, remote sensing data is acquired from various sensor technologies and exhibit diverse range of scale variations as well as modalities. Existing satellite image pre-training methods either ignore the scale information present in the remote sensing imagery or restrict themselves to use only a single type of data modality. In this paper, we re-visit transformers pre-training and leverage multi-scale information that is effectively utilized with multiple modalities. Our proposed approach, named SatMAE++, performs multi-scale pre-training and utilizes convolution based upsampling blocks to reconstruct the image at higher scales making it extensible to include more scales. Compared to existing works, the proposed SatMAE++ with multi-scale pre-training is equally effective for both optical as well as multi-spectral imagery. Extensive experiments on six datasets reveal the merits of proposed contributions, leading to state-of-the-art performance on all datasets. SatMAE++ achieves mean average precision (mAP) gain of 2.5\% for multi-label classification task on BigEarthNet dataset. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/techmn/satmae_pp.

Foundation models pre-trained on massive unlabeled datasets have revolutionized natural language and computer vision, exhibiting remarkable generalization capabilities, thus highlighting the importance of pre-training. Yet, efforts in robotics have struggled to achieve similar success, limited by either the need for costly robotic annotations or the lack of representations that effectively model the physical world. In this paper, we introduce ARM4R, an Auto-regressive Robotic Model that leverages low-level 4D Representations learned from human video data to yield a better pre-trained robotic model. Specifically, we focus on utilizing 3D point tracking representations from videos derived by lifting 2D representations into 3D space via monocular depth estimation across time. These 4D representations maintain a shared geometric structure between the points and robot state representations up to a linear transformation, enabling efficient transfer learning from human video data to low-level robotic control. Our experiments show that ARM4R can transfer efficiently from human video data to robotics and consistently improves performance on tasks across various robot environments and configurations.

3D pre-training is crucial to 3D perception tasks. Nevertheless, limited by the difficulties in collecting clean and complete 3D data, 3D pre-training has persistently faced data scaling challenges. In this work, we introduce a novel self-supervised pre-training framework that incorporates millions of images into 3D pre-training corpora by leveraging a large depth estimation model. New pre-training corpora encounter new challenges in representation ability and embedding efficiency of models. Previous pre-training methods rely on farthest point sampling and k-nearest neighbors to embed a fixed number of 3D tokens. However, these approaches prove inadequate when it comes to embedding millions of samples that feature a diverse range of point numbers, spanning from 1,000 to 100,000. In contrast, we propose a tokenizer with linear-time complexity, which enables the efficient embedding of a flexible number of tokens. Accordingly, a new 3D reconstruction target is proposed to cooperate with our 3D tokenizer. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D classification, few-shot learning, and 3D segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/XuechaoChen/P3P-MAE.

Unsupervised pre-training methods for large vision models have shown to enhance performance on downstream supervised tasks. Developing similar techniques for satellite imagery presents significant opportunities as unlabelled data is plentiful and the inherent temporal and multi-spectral structure provides avenues to further improve existing pre-training strategies. In this paper, we present SatMAE, a pre-training framework for temporal or multi-spectral satellite imagery based on Masked Autoencoder (MAE). To leverage temporal information, we include a temporal embedding along with independently masking image patches across time. In addition, we demonstrate that encoding multi-spectral data as groups of bands with distinct spectral positional encodings is beneficial. Our approach yields strong improvements over previous state-of-the-art techniques, both in terms of supervised learning performance on benchmark datasets (up to uparrow 7%), and transfer learning performance on downstream remote sensing tasks, including land cover classification (up to uparrow 14%) and semantic segmentation. Code and data are available on the project website: https://sustainlab-group.github.io/SatMAE/

Geospatial technologies are becoming increasingly essential in our world for a wide range of applications, including agriculture, urban planning, and disaster response. To help improve the applicability and performance of deep learning models on these geospatial tasks, various works have begun investigating foundation models for this domain. Researchers have explored two prominent approaches for introducing such models in geospatial applications, but both have drawbacks in terms of limited performance benefit or prohibitive training cost. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel paradigm for building highly effective geospatial foundation models with minimal resource cost and carbon impact. We first construct a compact yet diverse dataset from multiple sources to promote feature diversity, which we term GeoPile. Then, we investigate the potential of continual pretraining from large-scale ImageNet-22k models and propose a multi-objective continual pretraining paradigm, which leverages the strong representations of ImageNet while simultaneously providing the freedom to learn valuable in-domain features. Our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art geospatial pretraining methods in an extensive evaluation on seven downstream datasets covering various tasks such as change detection, classification, multi-label classification, semantic segmentation, and super-resolution.

Research in self-supervised learning (SSL) with natural images has progressed rapidly in recent years and is now increasingly being applied to and benchmarked with datasets containing remotely sensed imagery. A common benchmark case is to evaluate SSL pre-trained model embeddings on datasets of remotely sensed imagery with small patch sizes, e.g., 32x32 pixels, whereas standard SSL pre-training takes place with larger patch sizes, e.g., 224x224. Furthermore, pre-training methods tend to use different image normalization preprocessing steps depending on the dataset. In this paper, we show, across seven satellite and aerial imagery datasets of varying resolution, that by simply following the preprocessing steps used in pre-training (precisely, image sizing and normalization methods), one can achieve significant performance improvements when evaluating the extracted features on downstream tasks -- an important detail overlooked in previous work in this space. We show that by following these steps, ImageNet pre-training remains a competitive baseline for satellite imagery based transfer learning tasks -- for example we find that these steps give +32.28 to overall accuracy on the So2Sat random split dataset and +11.16 on the EuroSAT dataset. Finally, we report comprehensive benchmark results with a variety of simple baseline methods for each of the seven datasets, forming an initial benchmark suite for remote sensing imagery.

This paper advocates the use of implicit surface representation in autoencoder-based self-supervised 3D representation learning. The most popular and accessible 3D representation, i.e., point clouds, involves discrete samples of the underlying continuous 3D surface. This discretization process introduces sampling variations on the 3D shape, making it challenging to develop transferable knowledge of the true 3D geometry. In the standard autoencoding paradigm, the encoder is compelled to encode not only the 3D geometry but also information on the specific discrete sampling of the 3D shape into the latent code. This is because the point cloud reconstructed by the decoder is considered unacceptable unless there is a perfect mapping between the original and the reconstructed point clouds. This paper introduces the Implicit AutoEncoder (IAE), a simple yet effective method that addresses the sampling variation issue by replacing the commonly-used point-cloud decoder with an implicit decoder. The implicit decoder reconstructs a continuous representation of the 3D shape, independent of the imperfections in the discrete samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed IAE achieves state-of-the-art performance across various self-supervised learning benchmarks.

We present a novel masked image modeling (MIM) approach, context autoencoder (CAE), for self-supervised representation pretraining. We pretrain an encoder by making predictions in the encoded representation space. The pretraining tasks include two tasks: masked representation prediction - predict the representations for the masked patches, and masked patch reconstruction - reconstruct the masked patches. The network is an encoder-regressor-decoder architecture: the encoder takes the visible patches as input; the regressor predicts the representations of the masked patches, which are expected to be aligned with the representations computed from the encoder, using the representations of visible patches and the positions of visible and masked patches; the decoder reconstructs the masked patches from the predicted encoded representations. The CAE design encourages the separation of learning the encoder (representation) from completing the pertaining tasks: masked representation prediction and masked patch reconstruction tasks, and making predictions in the encoded representation space empirically shows the benefit to representation learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our CAE through superior transfer performance in downstream tasks: semantic segmentation, object detection and instance segmentation, and classification. The code will be available at https://github.com/Atten4Vis/CAE.

This paper presents EarthView, a comprehensive dataset specifically designed for self-supervision on remote sensing data, intended to enhance deep learning applications on Earth monitoring tasks. The dataset spans 15 tera pixels of global remote-sensing data, combining imagery from a diverse range of sources, including NEON, Sentinel, and a novel release of 1m spatial resolution data from Satellogic. Our dataset provides a wide spectrum of image data with varying resolutions, harnessed from different sensors and organized coherently into an accessible HuggingFace dataset in parquet format. This data spans five years, from 2017 to 2022. Accompanying the dataset, we introduce EarthMAE, a tailored Masked Autoencoder, developed to tackle the distinct challenges of remote sensing data. Trained in a self-supervised fashion, EarthMAE effectively processes different data modalities such as hyperspectral, multispectral, topographical data, segmentation maps, and temporal structure. This model helps us show that pre-training on Satellogic data improves performance on downstream tasks. While there is still a gap to fill in MAE for heterogeneous data, we regard this innovative combination of an expansive, diverse dataset and a versatile model adapted for self-supervised learning as a stride forward in deep learning for Earth monitoring.

Pre-training by numerous image data has become de-facto for robust 2D representations. In contrast, due to the expensive data acquisition and annotation, a paucity of large-scale 3D datasets severely hinders the learning for high-quality 3D features. In this paper, we propose an alternative to obtain superior 3D representations from 2D pre-trained models via Image-to-Point Masked Autoencoders, named as I2P-MAE. By self-supervised pre-training, we leverage the well learned 2D knowledge to guide 3D masked autoencoding, which reconstructs the masked point tokens with an encoder-decoder architecture. Specifically, we first utilize off-the-shelf 2D models to extract the multi-view visual features of the input point cloud, and then conduct two types of image-to-point learning schemes on top. For one, we introduce a 2D-guided masking strategy that maintains semantically important point tokens to be visible for the encoder. Compared to random masking, the network can better concentrate on significant 3D structures and recover the masked tokens from key spatial cues. For another, we enforce these visible tokens to reconstruct the corresponding multi-view 2D features after the decoder. This enables the network to effectively inherit high-level 2D semantics learned from rich image data for discriminative 3D modeling. Aided by our image-to-point pre-training, the frozen I2P-MAE, without any fine-tuning, achieves 93.4% accuracy for linear SVM on ModelNet40, competitive to the fully trained results of existing methods. By further fine-tuning on on ScanObjectNN's hardest split, I2P-MAE attains the state-of-the-art 90.11% accuracy, +3.68% to the second-best, demonstrating superior transferable capacity. Code will be available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/I2P-MAE.

Remote sensing change detection, identifying changes between scenes of the same location, is an active area of research with a broad range of applications. Recent advances in multimodal self-supervised pretraining have resulted in state-of-the-art methods which surpass vision models trained solely on optical imagery. In the remote sensing field, there is a wealth of overlapping 2D and 3D modalities which can be exploited to supervise representation learning in vision models. In this paper we propose Contrastive Surface-Image Pretraining (CSIP) for joint learning using optical RGB and above ground level (AGL) map pairs. We then evaluate these pretrained models on several building segmentation and change detection datasets to show that our method does, in fact, extract features relevant to downstream applications where natural and artificial surface information is relevant.

Generative models have achieved remarkable progress, yet applying them to satellite imagery remains challenging. Unlike natural imagery, satellite scenes are structured by spatially complex and semantically distinct geometries. Prior work addresses this complexity by adapting natural image frameworks using dense rasters or sparse prompts, trading off annotation cost and fidelity while breaking compatibility with vector primitives commonly used to represent geographic information. We introduce TerraDiT-Ω, a unified spatial control framework that generates satellite imagery directly from any native geospatial primitive. By jointly leveraging precise annotations (polygons, polylines) and coarser ones (bounding boxes, points), the model supports controllable layouts across varying annotation budgets, broadening applicability to design tasks such as urban planning while remaining naturally compatible with end-to-end GeoAI workflows. To effectively leverage these primitives during generation, we propose Geometry-Aware Local Attention, a conditioning mechanism that injects explicit geometric cues into the attention space. Across all conditioning formats, our approach consistently outperforms both dense-control and sparse-control baselines. Furthermore, this flexibility enables controllable synthetic data augmentation using a single generative model, improving downstream performance on land-cover segmentation, object detection, road graph extraction, and scene classification. Code, data, and weights are available at https://github.com/mvrl/TerraDiT.

Self-supervised pretraining on large-scale satellite data has raised great interest in building Earth observation (EO) foundation models. However, many important resources beyond pure satellite imagery, such as land-cover-land-use products that provide free global semantic information, as well as vision foundation models that hold strong knowledge of the natural world, tend to be overlooked. In this work, we show these free additional resources not only help resolve common contrastive learning bottlenecks, but also significantly boost the efficiency and effectiveness of EO pretraining. Specifically, we first propose soft contrastive learning that optimizes cross-scene soft similarity based on land-cover-generated multi-label supervision, naturally solving the issue of multiple positive samples and too strict positive matching in complex scenes. Second, we explore cross-domain continual pretraining for both multispectral and SAR imagery, building efficient EO foundation models from strongest vision models such as DINOv2. Integrating simple weight-initialization and Siamese masking strategies into our soft contrastive learning framework, we demonstrate impressive continual pretraining performance even when the input channels and modalities are not aligned. Without prohibitive training, we produce multispectral and SAR foundation models that achieve significantly better results in 9 out of 10 downstream tasks than most existing SOTA models. For example, our ResNet50/ViT-S achieve 84.8/85.0 linear probing mAP scores on BigEarthNet-10\% which are better than most existing ViT-L models; under the same setting, our ViT-B sets a new record of 86.8 in multispectral, and 82.5 in SAR, the latter even better than many multispectral models. Dataset and models are available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/softcon.

Mobile robots operating in unknown urban environments encounter a wide range of complex terrains to which they must adapt their planned trajectory for safe and efficient navigation. Most existing approaches utilize supervised learning to classify terrains from either an exteroceptive or a proprioceptive sensor modality. However, this requires a tremendous amount of manual labeling effort for each newly encountered terrain as well as for variations of terrains caused by changing environmental conditions. In this work, we propose a novel terrain classification framework leveraging an unsupervised proprioceptive classifier that learns from vehicle-terrain interaction sounds to self-supervise an exteroceptive classifier for pixel-wise semantic segmentation of images. To this end, we first learn a discriminative embedding space for vehicle-terrain interaction sounds from triplets of audio clips formed using visual features of the corresponding terrain patches and cluster the resulting embeddings. We subsequently use these clusters to label the visual terrain patches by projecting the traversed tracks of the robot into the camera images. Finally, we use the sparsely labeled images to train our semantic segmentation network in a weakly supervised manner. We present extensive quantitative and qualitative results that demonstrate that our proprioceptive terrain classifier exceeds the state-of-the-art among unsupervised methods and our self-supervised exteroceptive semantic segmentation model achieves a comparable performance to supervised learning with manually labeled data.

Feed-forward view synthesis models predict a novel view in a single pass with minimal 3D inductive bias. Existing works encode cameras as Plücker ray maps, which tie predictions to the arbitrary world coordinate gauge and make them sensitive to small camera transformations, thereby undermining geometric consistency. In this paper, we ask what inputs best condition a model for robust and consistent view synthesis. We propose projective conditioning, which replaces raw camera parameters with a target-view projective cue that provides a stable 2D input. This reframes the task from a brittle geometric regression problem in ray space to a well-conditioned target-view image-to-image translation problem. Additionally, we introduce a masked autoencoding pretraining strategy tailored to this cue, enabling the use of large-scale uncalibrated data for pretraining. Our method shows improved fidelity and stronger cross-view consistency compared to ray-conditioned baselines on our view-consistency benchmark. It also achieves state-of-the-art quality on standard novel view synthesis benchmarks.

Effective foundation modeling in remote sensing requires spatially aligned heterogeneous modalities coupled with semantically grounded supervision, yet such resources remain limited at scale. We present GeoMeld, a large-scale multimodal dataset with approximately 2.5 million spatially aligned samples. The dataset spans diverse modalities and resolutions and is constructed under a unified alignment protocol for modality-aware representation learning. GeoMeld provides semantically grounded language supervision through an agentic captioning framework that synthesizes and verifies annotations from spectral signals, terrain statistics, and structured geographic metadata, encoding measurable cross-modality relationships within textual descriptions. To leverage this dataset, we introduce GeoMeld-FM, a pretraining framework that combines multi-pretext masked autoencoding over aligned modalities, JEPA representation learning, and caption-vision contrastive alignment. This joint objective enables the learned representation space to capture both reliable cross-sensor physical consistency and grounded semantics. Experiments demonstrate consistent gains in downstream transfer and cross-sensor robustness. Together, GeoMeld and GeoMeld-FM establish a scalable reference framework for semantically grounded multi-modal foundation modeling in remote sensing.

Terrain modeling has traditionally relied on procedural techniques, which often require extensive domain expertise and handcrafted rules. In this paper, we present MESA - a novel data-centric alternative by training a diffusion model on global remote sensing data. This approach leverages large-scale geospatial information to generate high-quality terrain samples from text descriptions, showcasing a flexible and scalable solution for terrain generation. The model's capabilities are demonstrated through extensive experiments, highlighting its ability to generate realistic and diverse terrain landscapes. The dataset produced to support this work, the Major TOM Core-DEM extension dataset, is released openly as a comprehensive resource for global terrain data. The results suggest that data-driven models, trained on remote sensing data, can provide a powerful tool for realistic terrain modeling and generation.

Reliable terrain perception is a fundamental requirement for autonomous navigation in unstructured, off-road environments. Desert landscapes present unique challenges due to low chromatic contrast between terrain categories, extreme lighting variability, and sparse vegetation that defy the assumptions of standard road-scene segmentation models. We present DesertFormer, a semantic segmentation pipeline for off-road desert terrain analysis based on SegFormer B2 with a hierarchical Mix Transformer (MiT-B2) backbone. The system classifies terrain into ten ecologically meaningful categories -- Trees, Lush Bushes, Dry Grass, Dry Bushes, Ground Clutter, Flowers, Logs, Rocks, Landscape, and Sky -- enabling safety-aware path planning for ground robots and autonomous vehicles. Trained on a purpose-built dataset of 4,176 annotated off-road images at 512x512 resolution, DesertFormer achieves a mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 64.4% and pixel accuracy of 86.1%, representing a +24.2% absolute improvement over a DeepLabV3 MobileNetV2 baseline (41.0% mIoU). We further contribute a systematic failure analysis identifying the primary confusion patterns -- Ground Clutter to Landscape and Dry Grass to Landscape -- and propose class-weighted training and copy-paste augmentation for rare terrain categories. Code, checkpoints, and an interactive inference dashboard are released at https://github.com/Yasaswini-ch/Vision-based-Desert-Terrain-Segmentation-using-SegFormer.

We explore the use of convolutional neural networks for the semantic classification of remote sensing scenes. Two recently proposed architectures, CaffeNet and GoogLeNet, are adopted, with three different learning modalities. Besides conventional training from scratch, we resort to pre-trained networks that are only fine-tuned on the target data, so as to avoid overfitting problems and reduce design time. Experiments on two remote sensing datasets, with markedly different characteristics, testify on the effectiveness and wide applicability of the proposed solution, which guarantees a significant performance improvement over all state-of-the-art references.

We introduce a new generative approach for synthesizing 3D geometry and images from single-view collections. Most existing approaches predict volumetric density to render multi-view consistent images. By employing volumetric rendering using neural radiance fields, they inherit a key limitation: the generated geometry is noisy and unconstrained, limiting the quality and utility of the output meshes. To address this issue, we propose GeoGen, a new SDF-based 3D generative model trained in an end-to-end manner. Initially, we reinterpret the volumetric density as a Signed Distance Function (SDF). This allows us to introduce useful priors to generate valid meshes. However, those priors prevent the generative model from learning details, limiting the applicability of the method to real-world scenarios. To alleviate that problem, we make the transformation learnable and constrain the rendered depth map to be consistent with the zero-level set of the SDF. Through the lens of adversarial training, we encourage the network to produce higher fidelity details on the output meshes. For evaluation, we introduce a synthetic dataset of human avatars captured from 360-degree camera angles, to overcome the challenges presented by real-world datasets, which often lack 3D consistency and do not cover all camera angles. Our experiments on multiple datasets show that GeoGen produces visually and quantitatively better geometry than the previous generative models based on neural radiance fields.

Self-supervised learning has emerged as a powerful tool for remote sensing, where large amounts of unlabeled data are available. In this work, we investigate the use of DINO, a contrastive self-supervised method, for pretraining on remote sensing imagery. We introduce SatDINO, a model tailored for representation learning in satellite imagery. Through extensive experiments on multiple datasets in multiple testing setups, we demonstrate that SatDINO outperforms other state-of-the-art methods based on much more common masked autoencoders (MAE) and achieves competitive results in multiple benchmarks. We also provide a rigorous ablation study evaluating SatDINO's individual components. Finally, we propose a few novel enhancements, such as a new way to incorporate ground sample distance (GSD) encoding and adaptive view sampling. These enhancements can be used independently on our SatDINO model. Our code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/strakaj/SatDINO.

In this paper, we introduce PredBench, a benchmark tailored for the holistic evaluation of spatio-temporal prediction networks. Despite significant progress in this field, there remains a lack of a standardized framework for a detailed and comparative analysis of various prediction network architectures. PredBench addresses this gap by conducting large-scale experiments, upholding standardized and appropriate experimental settings, and implementing multi-dimensional evaluations. This benchmark integrates 12 widely adopted methods with 15 diverse datasets across multiple application domains, offering extensive evaluation of contemporary spatio-temporal prediction networks. Through meticulous calibration of prediction settings across various applications, PredBench ensures evaluations relevant to their intended use and enables fair comparisons. Moreover, its multi-dimensional evaluation framework broadens the analysis with a comprehensive set of metrics, providing deep insights into the capabilities of models. The findings from our research offer strategic directions for future developments in the field. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/OpenEarthLab/PredBench.

This paper tries to address a fundamental question in point cloud self-supervised learning: what is a good signal we should leverage to learn features from point clouds without annotations? To answer that, we introduce a point cloud representation learning framework, based on geometric feature reconstruction. In contrast to recent papers that directly adopt masked autoencoder (MAE) and only predict original coordinates or occupancy from masked point clouds, our method revisits differences between images and point clouds and identifies three self-supervised learning objectives peculiar to point clouds, namely centroid prediction, normal estimation, and curvature prediction. Combined with occupancy prediction, these four objectives yield an nontrivial self-supervised learning task and mutually facilitate models to better reason fine-grained geometry of point clouds. Our pipeline is conceptually simple and it consists of two major steps: first, it randomly masks out groups of points, followed by a Transformer-based point cloud encoder; second, a lightweight Transformer decoder predicts centroid, normal, and curvature for points in each voxel. We transfer the pre-trained Transformer encoder to a downstream peception model. On the nuScene Datset, our model achieves 3.38 mAP improvment for object detection, 2.1 mIoU gain for segmentation, and 1.7 AMOTA gain for multi-object tracking. We also conduct experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset and achieve significant performance improvements over baselines as well.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for point cloud pre-training has become a cornerstone for many 3D vision tasks, enabling effective learning from large-scale unannotated data. At the scene level, existing SSL methods often incorporate volume rendering into the pre-training framework, using RGB-D images as reconstruction signals to facilitate cross-modal learning. This strategy promotes alignment between 2D and 3D modalities and enables the model to benefit from rich visual cues in the RGB-D inputs. However, these approaches are limited by their reliance on implicit scene representations and high memory demands. Furthermore, since their reconstruction objectives are applied only in 2D space, they often fail to capture underlying 3D geometric structures. To address these challenges, we propose Gaussian2Scene, a novel scene-level SSL framework that leverages the efficiency and explicit nature of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for pre-training. The use of 3DGS not only alleviates the computational burden associated with volume rendering but also supports direct 3D scene reconstruction, thereby enhancing the geometric understanding of the backbone network. Our approach follows a progressive two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, a dual-branch masked autoencoder learns both 2D and 3D scene representations. In the second stage, we initialize training with reconstructed point clouds and further supervise learning using the geometric locations of Gaussian primitives and rendered RGB images. This process reinforces both geometric and cross-modal learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Gaussian2Scene across several downstream 3D object detection tasks, showing consistent improvements over existing pre-training methods.

State-of-the-art generative image and video models rely heavily on tokenizers that compress high-dimensional inputs into more efficient latent representations. While this paradigm has revolutionized RGB generation, Earth observation (EO) data presents unique challenges due to diverse sensor specifications and variable spectral channels. We propose EO-VAE, a multi-sensor variational autoencoder designed to serve as a foundational tokenizer for the EO domain. Unlike prior approaches that train separate tokenizers for each modality, EO-VAE utilizes a single model to encode and reconstruct flexible channel combinations via dynamic hypernetworks. Our experiments on the TerraMesh dataset demonstrate that EO-VAE achieves superior reconstruction fidelity compared to the TerraMind tokenizers, establishing a robust baseline for latent generative modeling in remote sensing.

We develop a novel method for carrying out model selection for Bayesian autoencoders (BAEs) by means of prior hyper-parameter optimization. Inspired by the common practice of type-II maximum likelihood optimization and its equivalence to Kullback-Leibler divergence minimization, we propose to optimize the distributional sliced-Wasserstein distance (DSWD) between the output of the autoencoder and the empirical data distribution. The advantages of this formulation are that we can estimate the DSWD based on samples and handle high-dimensional problems. We carry out posterior estimation of the BAE parameters via stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and turn our BAE into a generative model by fitting a flexible Dirichlet mixture model in the latent space. Consequently, we obtain a powerful alternative to variational autoencoders, which are the preferred choice in modern applications of autoencoders for representation learning with uncertainty. We evaluate our approach qualitatively and quantitatively using a vast experimental campaign on a number of unsupervised learning tasks and show that, in small-data regimes where priors matter, our approach provides state-of-the-art results, outperforming multiple competitive baselines.

Recent generative AI models have achieved remarkable breakthroughs in language and visual understanding. However, although these models can generate realistic visual content, their spatial scale remains confined to bounded environments, preventing them from capturing how geographic environments evolve across thousands of kilometers or from modeling the spatial structure of the large-scale physical world. This limitation poses a critical challenge for ultra-wide-area spatial intelligence in Earth observation and simulation, revealing a deeper gap in generative AI: progress has relied primarily on scaling model parameters and training data, while overlooking spatial scale as a core dimension of intelligence. Here, motivated by this missing dimension, we investigate spatial scale as a new scaling axis in foundation models and present MetaEarth3D, the first generative foundation model capable of spatially consistent generation at the planetary scale. Taking optical Earth observation simulation as a testbed, MetaEarth3D enables the generation of multi-level, unbounded, and diverse 3D scenes spanning large-scale terrains, medium-scale cities, and fine-grained street blocks. Built upon 10 million globally distributed real-world training images, MetaEarth3D demonstrates both strong visual realism and geospatial statistical realism. Beyond generation, MetaEarth3D serves as a generative data engine for diverse virtual environments in ultra-wide spatial intelligence. We argue that this study may help empower next-generation spatial intelligence for Earth observation.

Self-supervised pre-training has revolutionized foundation models for languages, individual 2D images and videos, but remains largely unexplored for learning 3D-aware representations from multi-view images. In this paper, we present E-RayZer, a self-supervised large 3D Vision model that learns truly 3D-aware representations directly from unlabeled images. Unlike prior self-supervised methods such as RayZer that infer 3D indirectly through latent-space view synthesis, E-RayZer operates directly in 3D space, performing self-supervised 3D reconstruction with Explicit geometry. This formulation eliminates shortcut solutions and yields representations that are geometrically grounded. To ensure convergence and scalability, we introduce a novel fine-grained learning curriculum that organizes training from easy to hard samples and harmonizes heterogeneous data sources in an entirely unsupervised manner. Experiments demonstrate that E-RayZer significantly outperforms RayZer on pose estimation, matches or sometimes surpasses fully supervised reconstruction models such as VGGT. Furthermore, its learned representations outperform leading visual pre-training models (e.g., DINOv3, CroCo v2, VideoMAE V2, and RayZer) when transferring to 3D downstream tasks, establishing E-RayZer as a new paradigm for 3D-aware visual pre-training.

Remote sensing imagery is dense with objects and contextual visual information. There is a recent trend to combine paired satellite images and text captions for pretraining performant encoders for downstream tasks. However, while contrastive image-text methods like CLIP enable vision-language alignment and zero-shot classification ability, vision-only downstream performance tends to degrade compared to image-only pretraining, such as MAE. In this paper, we propose FLAVARS, a pretraining method that combines the best of both contrastive learning and masked modeling, along with geospatial alignment via contrastive location encoding. We find that FLAVARS significantly outperforms a baseline of SkyCLIP for vision-only tasks such as KNN classification and semantic segmentation, +6\% mIOU on SpaceNet1, while retaining the ability to perform zero-shot classification, unlike MAE pretrained methods.

Pre-trained encoders are widely employed in dense prediction tasks for their capability to effectively extract visual features from images. The decoder subsequently processes these features to generate pixel-level predictions. However, due to structural differences and variations in input data, only encoders benefit from pre-learned representations from vision benchmarks such as image classification and self-supervised learning, while decoders are typically trained from scratch. In this paper, we introduce timesNet, which facilitates a "pre-trained encoder times pre-trained decoder" collaboration through three innovative designs. timesNet enables the direct utilization of pre-trained models within the decoder, integrating pre-learned representations into the decoding process to enhance performance in dense prediction tasks. By simply coupling the pre-trained encoder and pre-trained decoder, timesNet distinguishes itself as a highly promising approach. Remarkably, it achieves this without relying on decoding-specific structures or task-specific algorithms. Despite its streamlined design, timesNet outperforms advanced methods in tasks such as monocular depth estimation and semantic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance particularly in monocular depth estimation. and semantic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art results, especially in monocular depth estimation. embedding algorithms. Despite its streamlined design, timesNet outperforms advanced methods in tasks such as monocular depth estimation and semantic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance particularly in monocular depth estimation.

Recent progress in self-supervision has shown that pre-training large neural networks on vast amounts of unsupervised data can lead to substantial increases in generalization to downstream tasks. Such models, recently coined foundation models, have been transformational to the field of natural language processing. Variants have also been proposed for image data, but their applicability to remote sensing tasks is limited. To stimulate the development of foundation models for Earth monitoring, we propose a benchmark comprised of six classification and six segmentation tasks, which were carefully curated and adapted to be both relevant to the field and well-suited for model evaluation. We accompany this benchmark with a robust methodology for evaluating models and reporting aggregated results to enable a reliable assessment of progress. Finally, we report results for 20 baselines to gain information about the performance of existing models. We believe that this benchmark will be a driver of progress across a variety of Earth monitoring tasks.

Machine learning methods for satellite data have a range of societally relevant applications, but labels used to train models can be difficult or impossible to acquire. Self-supervision is a natural solution in settings with limited labeled data, but current self-supervised models for satellite data fail to take advantage of the characteristics of that data, including the temporal dimension (which is critical for many applications, such as monitoring crop growth) and availability of data from many complementary sensors (which can significantly improve a model's predictive performance). We present Presto (the Pretrained Remote Sensing Transformer), a model pre-trained on remote sensing pixel-timeseries data. By designing Presto specifically for remote sensing data, we can create a significantly smaller but performant model. Presto excels at a wide variety of globally distributed remote sensing tasks and performs competitively with much larger models while requiring far less compute. Presto can be used for transfer learning or as a feature extractor for simple models, enabling efficient deployment at scale.

Latent variable generative models have emerged as powerful tools for generative tasks including image and video synthesis. These models are enabled by pretrained autoencoders that map high resolution data into a compressed lower dimensional latent space, where the generative models can subsequently be developed while requiring fewer computational resources. Despite their effectiveness, the direct application of latent variable models to higher dimensional domains such as videos continues to pose challenges for efficient training and inference. In this paper, we propose an autoencoder that projects volumetric data onto a four-plane factorized latent space that grows sublinearly with the input size, making it ideal for higher dimensional data like videos. The design of our factorized model supports straightforward adoption in a number of conditional generation tasks with latent diffusion models (LDMs), such as class-conditional generation, frame prediction, and video interpolation. Our results show that the proposed four-plane latent space retains a rich representation needed for high-fidelity reconstructions despite the heavy compression, while simultaneously enabling LDMs to operate with significant improvements in speed and memory.

With the overwhelming trend of mask image modeling led by MAE, generative pre-training has shown a remarkable potential to boost the performance of fundamental models in 2D vision. However, in 3D vision, the over-reliance on Transformer-based backbones and the unordered nature of point clouds have restricted the further development of generative pre-training. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D-to-2D generative pre-training method that is adaptable to any point cloud model. We propose to generate view images from different instructed poses via the cross-attention mechanism as the pre-training scheme. Generating view images has more precise supervision than its point cloud counterpart, thus assisting 3D backbones to have a finer comprehension of the geometrical structure and stereoscopic relations of the point cloud. Experimental results have proved the superiority of our proposed 3D-to-2D generative pre-training over previous pre-training methods. Our method is also effective in boosting the performance of architecture-oriented approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance when fine-tuning on ScanObjectNN classification and ShapeNetPart segmentation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/TAP.

This paper presents two variations of a novel stochastic prediction algorithm that enables mobile robots to accurately and robustly predict the future state of complex dynamic scenes. The proposed algorithm uses a variational autoencoder to predict a range of possible future states of the environment. The algorithm takes full advantage of the motion of the robot itself, the motion of dynamic objects, and the geometry of static objects in the scene to improve prediction accuracy. Three simulated and real-world datasets collected by different robot models are used to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to achieve more accurate and robust prediction performance than other prediction algorithms. Furthermore, a predictive uncertainty-aware planner is proposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed predictor in simulation and real-world navigation experiments. Implementations are open source at https://github.com/TempleRAIL/SOGMP.

Masked point modeling has become a promising scheme of self-supervised pre-training for point clouds. Existing methods reconstruct either the original points or related features as the objective of pre-training. However, considering the diversity of downstream tasks, it is necessary for the model to have both low- and high-level representation modeling capabilities to capture geometric details and semantic contexts during pre-training. To this end, M^3CS is proposed to enable the model with the above abilities. Specifically, with masked point cloud as input, M^3CS introduces two decoders to predict masked representations and the original points simultaneously. While an extra decoder doubles parameters for the decoding process and may lead to overfitting, we propose siamese decoders to keep the amount of learnable parameters unchanged. Further, we propose an online codebook projecting continuous tokens into discrete ones before reconstructing masked points. In such way, we can enforce the decoder to take effect through the combinations of tokens rather than remembering each token. Comprehensive experiments show that M^3CS achieves superior performance at both classification and segmentation tasks, outperforming existing methods.

In contrast to numerous NLP and 2D vision foundational models, learning a 3D foundational model poses considerably greater challenges. This is primarily due to the inherent data variability and diversity of downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel universal 3D pre-training framework designed to facilitate the acquisition of efficient 3D representation, thereby establishing a pathway to 3D foundational models. Considering that informative 3D features should encode rich geometry and appearance cues that can be utilized to render realistic images, we propose to learn 3D representations by differentiable neural rendering. We train a 3D backbone with a devised volumetric neural renderer by comparing the rendered with the real images. Notably, our approach seamlessly integrates the learned 3D encoder into various downstream tasks. These tasks encompass not only high-level challenges such as 3D detection and segmentation but also low-level objectives like 3D reconstruction and image synthesis, spanning both indoor and outdoor scenarios. Besides, we also illustrate the capability of pre-training a 2D backbone using the proposed methodology, surpassing conventional pre-training methods by a large margin. For the first time, PonderV2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 indoor and outdoor benchmarks, implying its effectiveness. Code and models are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/PonderV2.

Auto-Regressive (AR) models have achieved impressive results in 2D image generation by modeling joint distributions in the grid space. While this approach has been extended to the 3D domain for powerful shape generation, it still has two limitations: expensive computations on volumetric grids and ambiguous auto-regressive order along grid dimensions. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Improved Auto-regressive Model (ImAM) for 3D shape generation, which applies discrete representation learning based on a latent vector instead of volumetric grids. Our approach not only reduces computational costs but also preserves essential geometric details by learning the joint distribution in a more tractable order. Moreover, thanks to the simplicity of our model architecture, we can naturally extend it from unconditional to conditional generation by concatenating various conditioning inputs, such as point clouds, categories, images, and texts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ImAM can synthesize diverse and faithful shapes of multiple categories, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Geospatial raster data, such as that collected by satellite-based imaging systems at different times and spectral bands, hold immense potential for enabling a wide range of high-impact applications. This potential stems from the rich information that is spatially and temporally contextualized across multiple channels and sensing modalities. Recent work has adapted existing self-supervised learning approaches for such geospatial data. However, they fall short of scalable model architectures, leading to inflexibility and computational inefficiencies when faced with an increasing number of channels and modalities. To address these limitations, we introduce Low-rank Efficient Spatial-Spectral Vision Transformer with three key innovations: i) the LESS Attention Block that approximates high-dimensional spatial-spectral attention through Kronecker's product of the low-dimensional spatial and spectral attention components; ii) the Continuous Positional-Channel Embedding Layer that preserves both the continuity and physical characteristics of each spatial-spectral patch; and iii) the Perception Field Mask that exploits local spatial dependencies by constraining attention to neighboring patches. To evaluate the proposed innovations, we construct GFM-Bench, which serves as a comprehensive benchmark for such geospatial raster data. We pretrain LESS ViT using a Hyperspectral Masked Autoencoder framework with integrated positional and channel masking strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art multi-modal geospatial foundation models while outperforming them on cross-satellite generalization tasks with higher computational efficiency. The flexibility and extensibility of our framework make it a promising direction for future geospatial data analysis tasks that involve a wide range of modalities and channels.

Deep generative vision models are now able to synthesize realistic-looking satellite imagery. But, the possibility of hallucinations prevents their adoption for risk-sensitive applications, such as generating materials for communicating climate change. To demonstrate this issue, we train a generative adversarial network (pix2pixHD) to create synthetic satellite imagery of future flooding and reforestation events. We find that a pure deep learning-based model can generate photorealistic flood visualizations but hallucinates floods at locations that were not susceptible to flooding. To address this issue, we propose to condition and evaluate generative vision models on segmentation maps of physics-based flood models. We show that our physics-conditioned model outperforms the pure deep learning-based model and a handcrafted baseline. We evaluate the generalization capability of our method to different remote sensing data and different climate-related events (reforestation). We publish our code and dataset which includes the data for a third case study of melting Arctic sea ice and >30,000 labeled HD image triplets -- or the equivalent of 5.5 million images at 128x128 pixels -- for segmentation guided image-to-image translation in Earth observation. Code and data is available at https://github.com/blutjens/eie-earth-public.

The potential for deploying autonomous systems can be significantly increased by improving the perception and interpretation of the environment. However, the development of deep learning-based techniques for autonomous systems in unstructured outdoor environments poses challenges due to limited data availability for training and testing. To address this gap, we present the German Outdoor and Offroad Dataset (GOOSE), a comprehensive dataset specifically designed for unstructured outdoor environments. The GOOSE dataset incorporates 10 000 labeled pairs of images and point clouds, which are utilized to train a range of state-of-the-art segmentation models on both image and point cloud data. We open source the dataset, along with an ontology for unstructured terrain, as well as dataset standards and guidelines. This initiative aims to establish a common framework, enabling the seamless inclusion of existing datasets and a fast way to enhance the perception capabilities of various robots operating in unstructured environments. The dataset, pre-trained models for offroad perception, and additional documentation can be found at https://goose-dataset.de/.

Auto-regressive models have achieved impressive results in 2D image generation by modeling joint distributions in grid space. In this paper, we extend auto-regressive models to 3D domains, and seek a stronger ability of 3D shape generation by improving auto-regressive models at capacity and scalability simultaneously. Firstly, we leverage an ensemble of publicly available 3D datasets to facilitate the training of large-scale models. It consists of a comprehensive collection of approximately 900,000 objects, with multiple properties of meshes, points, voxels, rendered images, and text captions. This diverse labeled dataset, termed Objaverse-Mix, empowers our model to learn from a wide range of object variations. However, directly applying 3D auto-regression encounters critical challenges of high computational demands on volumetric grids and ambiguous auto-regressive order along grid dimensions, resulting in inferior quality of 3D shapes. To this end, we then present a novel framework Argus3D in terms of capacity. Concretely, our approach introduces discrete representation learning based on a latent vector instead of volumetric grids, which not only reduces computational costs but also preserves essential geometric details by learning the joint distributions in a more tractable order. The capacity of conditional generation can thus be realized by simply concatenating various conditioning inputs to the latent vector, such as point clouds, categories, images, and texts. In addition, thanks to the simplicity of our model architecture, we naturally scale up our approach to a larger model with an impressive 3.6 billion parameters, further enhancing the quality of versatile 3D generation. Extensive experiments on four generation tasks demonstrate that Argus3D can synthesize diverse and faithful shapes across multiple categories, achieving remarkable performance.

A promising direction for pre-training 3D point clouds is to leverage the massive amount of data in 2D, whereas the domain gap between 2D and 3D creates a fundamental challenge. This paper proposes a novel approach to point-cloud pre-training that learns 3D representations by leveraging pre-trained 2D networks. Different from the popular practice of predicting 2D features first and then obtaining 3D features through dimensionality lifting, our approach directly uses a 3D network for feature extraction. We train the 3D feature extraction network with the help of the novel 2D knowledge transfer loss, which enforces the 2D projections of the 3D feature to be consistent with the output of pre-trained 2D networks. To prevent the feature from discarding 3D signals, we introduce the multi-view consistency loss that additionally encourages the projected 2D feature representations to capture pixel-wise correspondences across different views. Such correspondences induce 3D geometry and effectively retain 3D features in the projected 2D features. Experimental results demonstrate that our pre-trained model can be successfully transferred to various downstream tasks, including 3D shape classification, part segmentation, 3D object detection, and semantic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

At the most basic level, pixels are the source of the visual information through which we perceive the world. Pixels contain information at all levels, ranging from low-level attributes to high-level concepts. Autoencoders represent a classical and long-standing paradigm for learning representations from pixels or other raw inputs. In this work, we demonstrate that autoencoder-based self-supervised learning remains competitive today and can produce strong representations for downstream tasks, while remaining simple, stable, and efficient. Our model, codenamed "Pixio", is an enhanced masked autoencoder (MAE) with more challenging pre-training tasks and more capable architectures. The model is trained on 2B web-crawled images with a self-curation strategy with minimal human curation. Pixio performs competitively across a wide range of downstream tasks in the wild, including monocular depth estimation (e.g., Depth Anything), feed-forward 3D reconstruction (i.e., MapAnything), semantic segmentation, and robot learning, outperforming or matching DINOv3 trained at similar scales. Our results suggest that pixel-space self-supervised learning can serve as a promising alternative and a complement to latent-space approaches.

There has been a lot of recent interest in designing neural network models to estimate a distribution from a set of examples. We introduce a simple modification for autoencoder neural networks that yields powerful generative models. Our method masks the autoencoder's parameters to respect autoregressive constraints: each input is reconstructed only from previous inputs in a given ordering. Constrained this way, the autoencoder outputs can be interpreted as a set of conditional probabilities, and their product, the full joint probability. We can also train a single network that can decompose the joint probability in multiple different orderings. Our simple framework can be applied to multiple architectures, including deep ones. Vectorized implementations, such as on GPUs, are simple and fast. Experiments demonstrate that this approach is competitive with state-of-the-art tractable distribution estimators. At test time, the method is significantly faster and scales better than other autoregressive estimators.

Data-driven approaches like deep learning are rapidly advancing planetary science, particularly in Mars exploration. Despite recent progress, most existing benchmarks remain confined to closed-set supervised visual tasks and do not support text-guided retrieval for geospatial discovery. We introduce MarsRetrieval, a retrieval benchmark for evaluating vision-language models for Martian geospatial discovery. MarsRetrieval includes three tasks: (1) paired image-text retrieval, (2) landform retrieval, and (3) global geo-localization, covering multiple spatial scales and diverse geomorphic origins. We propose a unified retrieval-centric protocol to benchmark multimodal embedding architectures, including contrastive dual-tower encoders and generative vision-language models. Our evaluation shows MarsRetrieval is challenging: even strong foundation models often fail to capture domain-specific geomorphic distinctions. We further show that domain-specific fine-tuning is critical for generalizable geospatial discovery in planetary settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ml-stat-Sustech/MarsRetrieval

Masked Autoencoders (MAE) have shown great potentials in self-supervised pre-training for language and 2D image transformers. However, it still remains an open question on how to exploit masked autoencoding for learning 3D representations of irregular point clouds. In this paper, we propose Point-M2AE, a strong Multi-scale MAE pre-training framework for hierarchical self-supervised learning of 3D point clouds. Unlike the standard transformer in MAE, we modify the encoder and decoder into pyramid architectures to progressively model spatial geometries and capture both fine-grained and high-level semantics of 3D shapes. For the encoder that downsamples point tokens by stages, we design a multi-scale masking strategy to generate consistent visible regions across scales, and adopt a local spatial self-attention mechanism during fine-tuning to focus on neighboring patterns. By multi-scale token propagation, the lightweight decoder gradually upsamples point tokens with complementary skip connections from the encoder, which further promotes the reconstruction from a global-to-local perspective. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Point-M2AE for 3D representation learning. With a frozen encoder after pre-training, Point-M2AE achieves 92.9% accuracy for linear SVM on ModelNet40, even surpassing some fully trained methods. By fine-tuning on downstream tasks, Point-M2AE achieves 86.43% accuracy on ScanObjectNN, +3.36% to the second-best, and largely benefits the few-shot classification, part segmentation and 3D object detection with the hierarchical pre-training scheme. Code is available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/Point-M2AE.

The scale diversity of point cloud data presents significant challenges in developing unified representation learning techniques for 3D vision. Currently, there are few unified 3D models, and no existing pre-training method is equally effective for both object- and scene-level point clouds. In this paper, we introduce UniPre3D, the first unified pre-training method that can be seamlessly applied to point clouds of any scale and 3D models of any architecture. Our approach predicts Gaussian primitives as the pre-training task and employs differentiable Gaussian splatting to render images, enabling precise pixel-level supervision and end-to-end optimization. To further regulate the complexity of the pre-training task and direct the model's focus toward geometric structures, we integrate 2D features from pre-trained image models to incorporate well-established texture knowledge. We validate the universal effectiveness of our proposed method through extensive experiments across a variety of object- and scene-level tasks, using diverse point cloud models as backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/UniPre3D.

Despite the remarkable developments achieved by recent 3D generation works, scaling these methods to geographic extents, such as modeling thousands of square kilometers of Earth's surface, remains an open challenge. We address this through a dual innovation in data infrastructure and model architecture. First, we introduce Aerial-Earth3D, the largest 3D aerial dataset to date, consisting of 50k curated scenes (each measuring 600m x 600m) captured across the U.S. mainland, comprising 45M multi-view Google Earth frames. Each scene provides pose-annotated multi-view images, depth maps, normals, semantic segmentation, and camera poses, with explicit quality control to ensure terrain diversity. Building on this foundation, we propose EarthCrafter, a tailored framework for large-scale 3D Earth generation via sparse-decoupled latent diffusion. Our architecture separates structural and textural generation: 1) Dual sparse 3D-VAEs compress high-resolution geometric voxels and textural 2D Gaussian Splats (2DGS) into compact latent spaces, largely alleviating the costly computation suffering from vast geographic scales while preserving critical information. 2) We propose condition-aware flow matching models trained on mixed inputs (semantics, images, or neither) to flexibly model latent geometry and texture features independently. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EarthCrafter performs substantially better in extremely large-scale generation. The framework further supports versatile applications, from semantic-guided urban layout generation to unconditional terrain synthesis, while maintaining geographic plausibility through our rich data priors from Aerial-Earth3D. Our project page is available at https://whiteinblue.github.io/earthcrafter/

We introduce a novel method for pre-training of large-scale vision encoders. Building on recent advancements in autoregressive pre-training of vision models, we extend this framework to a multimodal setting, i.e., images and text. In this paper, we present AIMV2, a family of generalist vision encoders characterized by a straightforward pre-training process, scalability, and remarkable performance across a range of downstream tasks. This is achieved by pairing the vision encoder with a multimodal decoder that autoregressively generates raw image patches and text tokens. Our encoders excel not only in multimodal evaluations but also in vision benchmarks such as localization, grounding, and classification. Notably, our AIMV2-3B encoder achieves 89.5% accuracy on ImageNet-1k with a frozen trunk. Furthermore, AIMV2 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art contrastive models (e.g., CLIP, SigLIP) in multimodal image understanding across diverse settings.

In this paper we delve into the properties of transformers, attained through self-supervision, in the point cloud domain. Specifically, we evaluate the effectiveness of Masked Autoencoding as a pretraining scheme, and explore Momentum Contrast as an alternative. In our study we investigate the impact of data quantity on the learned features, and uncover similarities in the transformer's behavior across domains. Through comprehensive visualiations, we observe that the transformer learns to attend to semantically meaningful regions, indicating that pretraining leads to a better understanding of the underlying geometry. Moreover, we examine the finetuning process and its effect on the learned representations. Based on that, we devise an unfreezing strategy which consistently outperforms our baseline without introducing any other modifications to the model or the training pipeline, and achieve state-of-the-art results in the classification task among transformer models.

Self-supervised learning holds great promise for remote sensing, but standard self-supervised methods must be adapted to the unique characteristics of Earth observation data. We take a step in this direction by conducting a comprehensive benchmark of fusion strategies and reconstruction target normalization schemes for multimodal, multitemporal, and multispectral Earth observation data. Based on our findings, we propose MAESTRO, a novel adaptation of the Masked Autoencoder, featuring optimized fusion strategies and a tailored target normalization scheme that introduces a spectral prior as a self-supervisory signal. Evaluated on four Earth observation datasets, MAESTRO sets a new state-of-the-art on tasks that strongly rely on multitemporal dynamics, while remaining highly competitive on tasks dominated by a single mono-temporal modality. Code to reproduce all our experiments is available at https://github.com/ignf/maestro.

We introduce GeoWizard, a new generative foundation model designed for estimating geometric attributes, e.g., depth and normals, from single images. While significant research has already been conducted in this area, the progress has been substantially limited by the low diversity and poor quality of publicly available datasets. As a result, the prior works either are constrained to limited scenarios or suffer from the inability to capture geometric details. In this paper, we demonstrate that generative models, as opposed to traditional discriminative models (e.g., CNNs and Transformers), can effectively address the inherently ill-posed problem. We further show that leveraging diffusion priors can markedly improve generalization, detail preservation, and efficiency in resource usage. Specifically, we extend the original stable diffusion model to jointly predict depth and normal, allowing mutual information exchange and high consistency between the two representations. More importantly, we propose a simple yet effective strategy to segregate the complex data distribution of various scenes into distinct sub-distributions. This strategy enables our model to recognize different scene layouts, capturing 3D geometry with remarkable fidelity. GeoWizard sets new benchmarks for zero-shot depth and normal prediction, significantly enhancing many downstream applications such as 3D reconstruction, 2D content creation, and novel viewpoint synthesis.

Many mobile robots rely on 2D laser scanners for localization, mapping, and navigation. However, those sensors are unable to correctly provide distance to obstacles such as glass panels and tables whose actual occupancy is invisible at the height the sensor is measuring. In this work, instead of estimating the distance to obstacles from richer sensor readings such as 3D lasers or RGBD sensors, we present a method to estimate the distance directly from raw 2D laser data. To learn a mapping from raw 2D laser distances to obstacle distances we frame the problem as a learning task and train a neural network formed as an autoencoder. A novel configuration of network hyperparameters is proposed for the task at hand and is quantitatively validated on a test set. Finally, we qualitatively demonstrate in real time on a Care-O-bot 4 that the trained network can successfully infer obstacle distances from partial 2D laser readings.

Learning implicit representations has been a widely used solution for surface reconstruction from 3D point clouds. The latest methods infer a distance or occupancy field by overfitting a neural network on a single point cloud. However, these methods suffer from a slow inference due to the slow convergence of neural networks and the extensive calculation of distances to surface points, which limits them to small scale points. To resolve the scalability issue in surface reconstruction, we propose GridPull to improve the efficiency of learning implicit representations from large scale point clouds. Our novelty lies in the fast inference of a discrete distance field defined on grids without using any neural components. To remedy the lack of continuousness brought by neural networks, we introduce a loss function to encourage continuous distances and consistent gradients in the field during pulling queries onto the surface in grids near to the surface. We use uniform grids for a fast grid search to localize sampled queries, and organize surface points in a tree structure to speed up the calculation of distances to the surface. We do not rely on learning priors or normal supervision during optimization, and achieve superiority over the latest methods in terms of complexity and accuracy. We evaluate our method on shape and scene benchmarks, and report numerical and visual comparisons with the latest methods to justify our effectiveness and superiority. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchao15/GridPull.

Self-supervised pre-training based on next-token prediction has enabled large language models to capture the underlying structure of text, and has led to unprecedented performance on a large array of tasks when applied at scale. Similarly, autonomous driving generates vast amounts of spatiotemporal data, alluding to the possibility of harnessing scale to learn the underlying geometric and semantic structure of the environment and its evolution over time. In this direction, we propose a geometric and semantic self-supervised pre-training method, GASP, that learns a unified representation by predicting, at any queried future point in spacetime, (1) general occupancy, capturing the evolving structure of the 3D scene; (2) ego occupancy, modeling the ego vehicle path through the environment; and (3) distilled high-level features from a vision foundation model. By modeling geometric and semantic 4D occupancy fields instead of raw sensor measurements, the model learns a structured, generalizable representation of the environment and its evolution through time. We validate GASP on multiple autonomous driving benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements in semantic occupancy forecasting, online mapping, and ego trajectory prediction. Our results demonstrate that continuous 4D geometric and semantic occupancy prediction provides a scalable and effective pre-training paradigm for autonomous driving. For code and additional visualizations, see \href{https://research.zenseact.com/publications/gasp/.

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr^k, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EP_FID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID <= k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EP_FID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. Code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

We introduce EarthPT -- an Earth Observation (EO) pretrained transformer. EarthPT is a 700 million parameter decoding transformer foundation model trained in an autoregressive self-supervised manner and developed specifically with EO use-cases in mind. We demonstrate that EarthPT is an effective forecaster that can accurately predict future pixel-level surface reflectances across the 400-2300 nm range well into the future. For example, forecasts of the evolution of the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) have a typical error of approximately 0.05 (over a natural range of -1 -> 1) at the pixel level over a five month test set horizon, out-performing simple phase-folded models based on historical averaging. We also demonstrate that embeddings learnt by EarthPT hold semantically meaningful information and could be exploited for downstream tasks such as highly granular, dynamic land use classification. Excitingly, we note that the abundance of EO data provides us with -- in theory -- quadrillions of training tokens. Therefore, if we assume that EarthPT follows neural scaling laws akin to those derived for Large Language Models (LLMs), there is currently no data-imposed limit to scaling EarthPT and other similar `Large Observation Models.'

Earth observation data presents a unique challenge: it is spatial like images, sequential like video or text, and highly multimodal. We present OlmoEarth: a multimodal, spatio-temporal foundation model that employs a novel self-supervised learning formulation, masking strategy, and loss all designed for the Earth observation domain. OlmoEarth achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to 12 other foundation models across a variety of research benchmarks and real-world tasks from external partners. When evaluating embeddings OlmoEarth achieves the best performance on 15 out of 24 tasks, and with full fine-tuning it is the best on 19 of 29 tasks. We deploy OlmoEarth as the backbone of an end-to-end platform for data collection, labeling, training, and inference of Earth observation models. The OlmoEarth Platform puts frontier foundation models and powerful data management tools into the hands of non-profits and NGOs working to solve the world's biggest problems. OlmoEarth source code, training data, and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/allenai/olmoearth_pretrain{https://github.com/allenai/olmoearth_pretrain}.

Unsupervised learning with functional data is an emerging paradigm of machine learning research with applications to computer vision, climate modeling and physical systems. A natural way of modeling functional data is by learning operators between infinite dimensional spaces, leading to discretization invariant representations that scale independently of the sample grid resolution. Here we present Variational Autoencoding Neural Operators (VANO), a general strategy for making a large class of operator learning architectures act as variational autoencoders. For this purpose, we provide a novel rigorous mathematical formulation of the variational objective in function spaces for training. VANO first maps an input function to a distribution over a latent space using a parametric encoder and then decodes a sample from the latent distribution to reconstruct the input, as in classic variational autoencoders. We test VANO with different model set-ups and architecture choices for a variety of benchmarks. We start from a simple Gaussian random field where we can analytically track what the model learns and progressively transition to more challenging benchmarks including modeling phase separation in Cahn-Hilliard systems and real world satellite data for measuring Earth surface deformation.

A significant weakness of most current deep Convolutional Neural Networks is the need to train them using vast amounts of manu- ally labelled data. In this work we propose a unsupervised framework to learn a deep convolutional neural network for single view depth predic- tion, without requiring a pre-training stage or annotated ground truth depths. We achieve this by training the network in a manner analogous to an autoencoder. At training time we consider a pair of images, source and target, with small, known camera motion between the two such as a stereo pair. We train the convolutional encoder for the task of predicting the depth map for the source image. To do so, we explicitly generate an inverse warp of the target image using the predicted depth and known inter-view displacement, to reconstruct the source image; the photomet- ric error in the reconstruction is the reconstruction loss for the encoder. The acquisition of this training data is considerably simpler than for equivalent systems, requiring no manual annotation, nor calibration of depth sensor to camera. We show that our network trained on less than half of the KITTI dataset (without any further augmentation) gives com- parable performance to that of the state of art supervised methods for single view depth estimation.

Recent advances in Earth Observation have focused on large-scale foundation models. However, these models are computationally expensive, limiting their accessibility and reuse for downstream tasks. In this work, we investigate compact architectures as a practical pathway toward smaller general-purpose EO models. We propose a Metadata-aware Mixture-of-Experts Masked Autoencoder (MoE-MAE) with only 2.5M parameters. The model combines sparse expert routing with geo-temporal conditioning, incorporating imagery alongside latitude/longitude and seasonal/daily cyclic encodings. We pretrain the MoE-MAE on the BigEarthNet-Landsat dataset and evaluate embeddings from its frozen encoder using linear probes. Despite its small size, the model competes with much larger architectures, demonstrating that metadata-aware pretraining improves transfer and label efficiency. To further assess generalization, we evaluate on the EuroSAT-Landsat dataset, which lacks explicit metadata, and still observe competitive performance compared to models with hundreds of millions of parameters. These results suggest that compact, metadata-aware MoE-MAEs are an efficient and scalable step toward future EO foundation models.

Remote sensing has become critical for understanding environmental dynamics, urban planning, and disaster management. However, traditional remote sensing workflows often rely on explicit segmentation or detection methods, which struggle to handle complex, implicit queries that require reasoning over spatial context, domain knowledge, and implicit user intent. Motivated by this, we introduce a new task, \ie, geospatial pixel reasoning, which allows implicit querying and reasoning and generates the mask of the target region. To advance this task, we construct and release the first large-scale benchmark dataset called EarthReason, which comprises 5,434 manually annotated image masks with over 30,000 implicit question-answer pairs. Moreover, we propose SegEarth-R1, a simple yet effective language-guided segmentation baseline that integrates a hierarchical visual encoder, a large language model (LLM) for instruction parsing, and a tailored mask generator for spatial correlation. The design of SegEarth-R1 incorporates domain-specific adaptations, including aggressive visual token compression to handle ultra-high-resolution remote sensing images, a description projection module to fuse language and multi-scale features, and a streamlined mask prediction pipeline that directly queries description embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SegEarth-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on both reasoning and referring segmentation tasks, significantly outperforming traditional and LLM-based segmentation methods. Our data and code will be released at https://github.com/earth-insights/SegEarth-R1.

Vision-language pre-trained models (VLPs) are widely used in real-world applications. However, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Although adversarial detection methods have demonstrated success in single-modality settings (either vision or language), their effectiveness and reliability in multimodal models such as VLPs remain largely unexplored. In this work, we study the geometry of VLP embedding spaces and observe structured anisotropy that differs from unimodal vision models. Our theoretical analysis shows that under this anisotropic structure, adversarial attacks increase the expected geometric separation between clean and adversarial examples (AEs). Specifically, we demonstrate that AEs consistently exhibit greater expected distances to randomly sampled points than their clean counterparts, indicating that AEs tend to push representations out of manifold regions. Building on these insights, we propose GeoDetect, which leverages these off-manifold deviations via geometric scores to identify AEs. Through comprehensive evaluations, we show that our approach reliably detects AEs across diverse VLP architectures and threat settings, covering unimodal and multimodal attacks as well as adaptive attacks, thereby providing a robust and practical approach to improving the safety and reliability of these models.

High-Definition Maps (HD maps) are essential for the precise navigation and decision-making of autonomous vehicles, yet their creation and upkeep present significant cost and timeliness challenges. The online construction of HD maps using on-board sensors has emerged as a promising solution; however, these methods can be impeded by incomplete data due to occlusions and inclement weather. This paper proposes the PriorDrive framework to addresses these limitations by harnessing the power of prior maps, significantly enhancing the robustness and accuracy of online HD map construction. Our approach integrates a variety of prior maps, such as OpenStreetMap's Standard Definition Maps (SD maps), outdated HD maps from vendors, and locally constructed maps from historical vehicle data. To effectively encode this prior information into online mapping models, we introduce a Hybrid Prior Representation (HPQuery) that standardizes the representation of diverse map elements. At the core of PriorDrive is the Unified Vector Encoder (UVE), which employs hybrid prior embedding and a dual encoding mechanism to process vector data. Furthermore, we propose a segment-level and point-level pre-training strategy that enables the UVE to learn the prior distribution of vector data, thereby improving the encoder's generalizability and performance. Through extensive testing on the nuScenes, Argoverse 2 and OpenLane-V2, we demonstrate that PriorDrive is highly compatible with various online mapping models and substantially improves map prediction capabilities. The integration of prior maps through the PriorDrive framework offers a robust solution to the challenges of single-perception data, paving the way for more reliable autonomous vehicle navigation.

Foundation models offer a promising route to transferable remote sensing representations, but many current approaches depend on very large pretraining datasets and fixed sensor configurations, limiting their suitability for ecological and environmental applications, where observations often vary across platforms, spatial and spectral resolutions, and available modalities. We introduce FLORO, a multimodal geospatial foundation model designed to learn transferable representations from a small but highly diverse remote sensing corpus. FLORO is pretrained using masked autoencoding on a heterogeneous combination of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, SkySAT imagery, elevation, and UAV-derived data. To accommodate sensor variability, FLORO incorporates availability-aware inputs that indicate which spectral bands and auxiliary modalities are present in each sample, enabling a unified input space across heterogeneous sensor configurations. We evaluated FLORO on the PANGAEA benchmark under a frozen-encoder protocol across scene classification, segmentation, and regression tasks. Despite being pretrained on a smaller corpus than competing foundation models, FLORO achieved strong and stable transfer across optical, optical-SAR, and optical-elevation benchmarks spanning medium-resolution satellite, airborne, and ultra-high-resolution UAV imagery. FLORO obtained the second-best average segmentation performance across six PANGAEA benchmarks, trailing only a recently introduced foundation model pretrained on over two orders of magnitude more images, remained competitive on scene classification, and was robust in regression tasks, while qualitative results showed improved preservation of spatial structure in flood, urban, biomass, and canopy-height prediction settings. In a separate controlled experiment on EuroSAT-MS, geo-positional encoding further improved classification relative to absolute positional encoding.

While computer science has seen remarkable advancements in foundation models, which remain underexplored in geoscience. Addressing this gap, we introduce a workflow to develop geophysical foundation models, including data preparation, model pre-training, and adaption to downstream tasks. From 192 globally collected 3-D seismic volumes, we create a carefully curated dataset of 2,286,422 2-D seismic images. Fully using these unlabeled images, we employ the self-supervised learning to pre-train a Transformer-based Seismic Foundation Model (SFM) for producing all-purpose seismic features that work across various tasks and surveys. Through experiments on seismic facies classification, geobody identification, interpolation, denoising, and inversion, our pre-trained model demonstrates versatility, generalization, scalability, and superior performance over baseline models. Conclusively, we provide a foundation model and vast dataset to advance AI in geophysics, addressing challenges (poor generalization, lacking labels, and repetitive training for task-specified models) of applying AI in geophysics and paving the way for future innovations in geoscience.

The pre-training architectures of large language models encompass various types, including autoencoding models, autoregressive models, and encoder-decoder models. We posit that any modality can potentially benefit from a large language model, as long as it undergoes vector quantization to become discrete tokens. Inspired by GLM, we propose a General Point Model (GPM) which seamlessly integrates autoencoding and autoregressive tasks in point cloud transformer. This model is versatile, allowing fine-tuning for downstream point cloud representation tasks, as well as unconditional and conditional generation tasks. GPM enhances masked prediction in autoencoding through various forms of mask padding tasks, leading to improved performance in point cloud understanding. Additionally, GPM demonstrates highly competitive results in unconditional point cloud generation tasks, even exhibiting the potential for conditional generation tasks by modifying the input's conditional information. Compared to models like Point-BERT, MaskPoint and PointMAE, our GPM achieves superior performance in point cloud understanding tasks. Furthermore, the integration of autoregressive and autoencoding within the same transformer underscores its versatility across different downstream tasks.

Unsupervised pre-training methods utilizing large and diverse datasets have achieved tremendous success across a range of domains. Recent work has investigated such unsupervised pre-training methods for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) but is limited to domain-specific or simulated data. In this paper, we study the problem of pre-training world models with abundant in-the-wild videos for efficient learning of downstream visual control tasks. However, in-the-wild videos are complicated with various contextual factors, such as intricate backgrounds and textured appearance, which precludes a world model from extracting shared world knowledge to generalize better. To tackle this issue, we introduce Contextualized World Models (ContextWM) that explicitly model both the context and dynamics to overcome the complexity and diversity of in-the-wild videos and facilitate knowledge transfer between distinct scenes. Specifically, a contextualized extension of the latent dynamics model is elaborately realized by incorporating a context encoder to retain contextual information and empower the image decoder, which allows the latent dynamics model to concentrate on essential temporal variations. Our experiments show that in-the-wild video pre-training equipped with ContextWM can significantly improve the sample-efficiency of MBRL in various domains, including robotic manipulation, locomotion, and autonomous driving.

Pre-training has been investigated to improve the efficiency and performance of training neural operators in data-scarce settings. However, it is largely in its infancy due to the inherent complexity and diversity, such as long trajectories, multiple scales and varying dimensions of partial differential equations (PDEs) data. In this paper, we present a new auto-regressive denoising pre-training strategy, which allows for more stable and efficient pre-training on PDE data and generalizes to various downstream tasks. Moreover, by designing a flexible and scalable model architecture based on Fourier attention, we can easily scale up the model for large-scale pre-training. We train our PDE foundation model with up to 0.5B parameters on 10+ PDE datasets with more than 100k trajectories. Extensive experiments show that we achieve SOTA on these benchmarks and validate the strong generalizability of our model to significantly enhance performance on diverse downstream PDE tasks like 3D data. Code is available at https://github.com/thu-ml/DPOT.

Large-scale foundation models in Earth Observation can learn versatile, label-efficient representations by leveraging massive amounts of unlabeled data. However, existing public datasets are often limited in scale, geographic coverage, or sensor variety. We introduce TerraMesh, a new globally diverse, multimodal dataset combining optical, synthetic aperture radar, elevation, and land-cover modalities in an Analysis-Ready Data format. TerraMesh includes over 9 million samples with eight spatiotemporal aligned modalities, enabling large-scale pre-training and fostering robust cross-modal correlation learning. We provide detailed data processing steps, comprehensive statistics, and empirical evidence demonstrating improved model performance when pre-trained on TerraMesh. The dataset will be made publicly available with a permissive license.

Learning with large-scale unlabeled data has become a powerful tool for pre-training Visual Transformers (VTs). However, prior works tend to overlook that, in real-world scenarios, the input data may be corrupted and unreliable. Pre-training VTs on such corrupted data can be challenging, especially when we pre-train via the masked autoencoding approach, where both the inputs and masked ``ground truth" targets can potentially be unreliable in this case. To address this limitation, we introduce the Token Boosting Module (TBM) as a plug-and-play component for VTs that effectively allows the VT to learn to extract clean and robust features during masked autoencoding pre-training. We provide theoretical analysis to show how TBM improves model pre-training with more robust and generalizable representations, thus benefiting downstream tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to analyze TBM's effectiveness, and results on four corrupted datasets demonstrate that TBM consistently improves performance on downstream tasks.

Many pixelwise dense prediction tasks-depth estimation and semantic segmentation in computer vision today rely on pretrained image representations. Therefore, curating effective pretraining datasets is vital. Unfortunately, the effective pretraining datasets are those with multi-view scenes and have only been curated using annotated 3D meshes, point clouds, and camera parameters from simulated environments. We propose a dataset-curation mechanism that does not require any annotations. We mine two datasets: MIMIC-1M with 1.3M and MIMIC-3M with 3.1M multi-view image pairs from open-sourced video datasets and from synthetic 3D environments. We train multiple self-supervised models with different masked image modeling objectives to showcase the following findings: Representations trained on MIMIC-3M outperform those mined using annotations on multiple downstream tasks, including depth estimation, semantic segmentation, surface normals, and pose estimation. They also outperform representations that are frozen and when downstream training data is limited to few-shot. Larger dataset (MIMIC-3M) significantly improves performance, which is promising since our curation method can arbitrarily scale to produce even larger datasets. MIMIC code, dataset, and pretrained models are open-sourced at https://github.com/RAIVNLab/MIMIC.

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (S4) has advanced remote sensing (RS) analysis by leveraging unlabeled data through pseudo-labeling and consistency learning. However, existing S4 studies often rely on small-scale datasets and models, limiting their practical applicability. To address this, we propose S5, the first scalable framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation in RS, which unlocks the potential of vast unlabeled Earth observation data typically underutilized due to costly pixel-level annotations. Built upon existing large-scale RS datasets, S5 introduces a data selection strategy that integrates entropy-based filtering and diversity expansion, resulting in the RS4P-1M dataset. Using this dataset, we systematically scale up S4 into a new pretraining paradigm, S4 pre-training (S4P), to pretrain RS foundation models (RSFMs) of varying sizes on this extensive corpus, significantly boosting their performance on land cover segmentation and object detection tasks. Furthermore, during fine-tuning, we incorporate a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based multi-dataset fine-tuning approach, which enables efficient adaptation to multiple RS benchmarks with fewer parameters. This approach improves the generalization and versatility of RSFMs across diverse RS benchmarks. The resulting RSFMs achieve state-of-the-art performance across all benchmarks, underscoring the viability of scaling semi-supervised learning for RS applications. All datasets, code, and models will be released at https://github.com/MiliLab/S5

Spatiotemporal forecasting techniques are significant for various domains such as transportation, energy, and weather. Accurate prediction of spatiotemporal series remains challenging due to the complex spatiotemporal heterogeneity. In particular, current end-to-end models are limited by input length and thus often fall into spatiotemporal mirage, i.e., similar input time series followed by dissimilar future values and vice versa. To address these problems, we propose a novel self-supervised pre-training framework Spatial-Temporal-Decoupled Masked Pre-training (STD-MAE) that employs two decoupled masked autoencoders to reconstruct spatiotemporal series along the spatial and temporal dimensions. Rich-context representations learned through such reconstruction could be seamlessly integrated by downstream predictors with arbitrary architectures to augment their performances. A series of quantitative and qualitative evaluations on six widely used benchmarks (PEMS03, PEMS04, PEMS07, PEMS08, METR-LA, and PEMS-BAY) are conducted to validate the state-of-the-art performance of STD-MAE. Codes are available at https://github.com/Jimmy-7664/STD-MAE.

We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to capture critical spatial nuances. We pretrained TerraMind on nine geospatial modalities of a global, large-scale dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that (i) TerraMind's dual-scale early fusion approach unlocks a range of zero-shot and few-shot applications for Earth observation, (ii) TerraMind introduces "Thinking-in-Modalities" (TiM) -- the capability of generating additional artificial data during finetuning and inference to improve the model output -- and (iii) TerraMind achieves beyond state-of-the-art performance in community-standard benchmarks for EO like PANGAEA. The pretraining dataset, the model weights, and our code is open-sourced under a permissive license.

We present ABot-Earth 0.5, a generative 3D framework designed to synthesize vast, seamless 3D environments from ubiquitous, geospatially referenced satellite imagery. To achieve this, we propose a novel generative model formulated directly with the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation. The model is trained on a diverse corpus of existing real-world urban reconstructions, learning to generate realistic geometry and textures. At inference, it synthesizes novel 3D scenes conditioned solely on satellite imagery at a scalable rate of under 10 minutes per square kilometer, while demonstrating exceptional realism. The framework is designed for accessibility, with integrated hierarchical level-of-detail (LOD) structures that permit real-time, interactive visualization on web-based map engines. This high-fidelity simulation sandbox effectively mitigates the sim-to-real domain gap, enabling critical downstream Embodied AI applications like closed-loop UAV navigation. By providing an ultra-low-cost and high-efficiency solution, ABot-Earth 0.5 significantly lowers the technical and financial barriers to large-scale 3D reconstruction and empowers the future of global digital earth visualization.

Pre-training convolutional neural networks with weakly-supervised and self-supervised strategies is becoming increasingly popular for several computer vision tasks. However, due to the lack of strong discriminative signals, these learned representations may overfit to the pre-training objective (e.g., hashtag prediction) and not generalize well to downstream tasks. In this work, we present a simple strategy - ClusterFit (CF) to improve the robustness of the visual representations learned during pre-training. Given a dataset, we (a) cluster its features extracted from a pre-trained network using k-means and (b) re-train a new network from scratch on this dataset using cluster assignments as pseudo-labels. We empirically show that clustering helps reduce the pre-training task-specific information from the extracted features thereby minimizing overfitting to the same. Our approach is extensible to different pre-training frameworks -- weak- and self-supervised, modalities -- images and videos, and pre-training tasks -- object and action classification. Through extensive transfer learning experiments on 11 different target datasets of varied vocabularies and granularities, we show that ClusterFit significantly improves the representation quality compared to the state-of-the-art large-scale (millions / billions) weakly-supervised image and video models and self-supervised image models.

In recent years, image synthesis has achieved remarkable advancements, enabling diverse applications in content creation, virtual reality, and beyond. We introduce a novel approach to image generation using Auto-Regressive (AR) modeling, which leverages a next-detail prediction strategy for enhanced fidelity and scalability. While AR models have achieved transformative success in language modeling, replicating this success in vision tasks has presented unique challenges due to the inherent spatial dependencies in images. Our proposed method addresses these challenges by iteratively adding finer details to an image compositionally, constructing it as a hierarchical combination of base and detail image factors. This strategy is shown to be more effective than the conventional next-token prediction and even surpasses the state-of-the-art next-scale prediction approaches. A key advantage of this method is its scalability to higher resolutions without requiring full model retraining, making it a versatile solution for high-resolution image generation.

3D generation has witnessed significant advancements, yet efficiently producing high-quality 3D assets from a single image remains challenging. In this paper, we present a triplane autoencoder, which encodes 3D models into a compact triplane latent space to effectively compress both the 3D geometry and texture information. Within the autoencoder framework, we introduce a 3D-aware cross-attention mechanism, which utilizes low-resolution latent representations to query features from a high-resolution 3D feature volume, thereby enhancing the representation capacity of the latent space. Subsequently, we train a diffusion model on this refined latent space. In contrast to solely relying on image embedding for 3D generation, our proposed method advocates for the simultaneous utilization of both image embedding and shape embedding as conditions. Specifically, the shape embedding is estimated via a diffusion prior model conditioned on the image embedding. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, achieving superior performance while requiring less training data and time. Our approach enables the generation of high-quality 3D assets in merely 7 seconds on a single A100 GPU.

Accurate digital surface models (DSMs) are essential for many geospatial applications, including urban monitoring, environmental analyses, infrastructure management, and change detection. However, large-scale DSMs frequently contain incomplete or outdated regions due to acquisition limitations, reconstruction artifacts, or changes in the built environment. Traditional height completion approaches primarily rely on spatial interpolation or which assume spatial continuity and therefore fail when objects are missing. Recent learning-based approaches improve reconstruction quality but typically require supervised training on sensor-specific datasets, limiting their generalization across domains and sensing conditions. We propose Prior2DSM, a training-free framework for metric DSM completion that operates entirely at test time by leveraging foundation models. Unlike previous height completion approaches that require task-specific training, the proposed method combines self-supervised Vision Transformer (ViT) features from DINOv3 with monocular depth foundation models to propagate metric information from incomplete height priors through semantic feature-space correspondence. Test-time adaptation (TTA) is performed using parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA) together with a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP), which predicts spatially varying scale and shift parameters to convert relative depth estimates into metric heights. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over interpolation based methods, prior-based rescaling height approaches, and state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models. Prior2DSM reduces reconstruction error while preserving structural fidelity, achieving up to a 46% reduction in RMSE compared to linear fitting of MDE, and further enables DSM updating and coupled RGB-DSM generation.

In the current deep learning paradigm, the amount and quality of training data are as critical as the network architecture and its training details. However, collecting, processing, and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, particularly for tasks such as 3D object registration. While synthetic datasets can be created, they require expertise to design and include a limited number of categories. In this paper, we introduce a new approach called AutoSynth, which automatically generates 3D training data for point cloud registration. Specifically, AutoSynth automatically curates an optimal dataset by exploring a search space encompassing millions of potential datasets with diverse 3D shapes at a low cost.To achieve this, we generate synthetic 3D datasets by assembling shape primitives, and develop a meta-learning strategy to search for the best training data for 3D registration on real point clouds. For this search to remain tractable, we replace the point cloud registration network with a much smaller surrogate network, leading to a 4056.43 times speedup. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by implementing it with two different point cloud registration networks, BPNet and IDAM. Our results on TUD-L, LINEMOD and Occluded-LINEMOD evidence that a neural network trained on our searched dataset yields consistently better performance than the same one trained on the widely used ModelNet40 dataset.

Remote sensing offers an unparalleled vantage point for observing the Earth's long-term surface evolution, yet it demands that a model not only perceive land cover at isolated moments, but also track changes, memorize evolution histories, and reason across time and space. However, existing studies lack a systematic evaluation that dissects these distinct competencies. To fill this gap, we introduce ChronoBench, a multidimensional benchmark that decomposes this task into four progressive cognitive levels (i.e., Land Cover Perception, Temporal Recognition, Long-Term Memory, and Spatio-Temporal Reasoning). The ChronoBench comprises 12 sub-tasks and 17,689 rigorously validated QA (Question-Answer) pairs. Extensive evaluations reveal that mainstream MLLMs fall drastically behind human experts, with Long-Term Memory emerging as the most critical bottleneck. Motivated by this finding, we further propose GeoChrono, an MLLM with enhanced capabilities for tracing, memorizing, and reasoning about long-term geographic evolution. Leveraging the physical prior that geographic parcels remain spatially fixed while their semantics evolve, we design a Temporal Trajectory Encoder~(TempEnc) that constructs per-location temporal trajectories for dedicated land cover evolution modeling, and we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine Token Compressor~(C2FComp) that adaptively preserves dynamic regions while compressing the static background. To support training, we also construct ChronoInstruct, a 104K-sample instruction-tuning dataset spanning all competency levels for training. GeoChrono achieves state-of-the-art performance on ChronoBench, surpassing the leading commercial MLLMs by over 20%, while C2FComp reduces visual tokens by over 56% while retaining GeoChrono's 94.6% performance. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/IntelliSensing/GeoChrono

The rapid progress of Transformers in artificial intelligence has come at the cost of increased resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions due to growing model sizes. Prior work suggests using pretrained small models to improve training efficiency, but this approach may not be suitable for new model structures. On the other hand, training from scratch can be slow, and progressively stacking layers often fails to achieve significant acceleration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called Apollo, which prepares lessons for expanding operations by learning high-layer functionality during training of low layers. Our approach involves low-value-prioritized sampling (LVPS) to train different depths and weight sharing to facilitate efficient expansion. We also introduce an interpolation method for stable model depth extension. Experiments demonstrate that Apollo achieves state-of-the-art acceleration ratios, even rivaling methods using pretrained models, making it a universal and efficient solution for training deep models while reducing time, financial, and environmental costs.

Geospatial analysis lacks methods like the word vector representations and pre-trained networks that significantly boost performance across a wide range of natural language and computer vision tasks. To fill this gap, we introduce Tile2Vec, an unsupervised representation learning algorithm that extends the distributional hypothesis from natural language -- words appearing in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings -- to spatially distributed data. We demonstrate empirically that Tile2Vec learns semantically meaningful representations on three datasets. Our learned representations significantly improve performance in downstream classification tasks and, similar to word vectors, visual analogies can be obtained via simple arithmetic in the latent space.

The field of self-supervised learning (SSL) for 3D medical images lacks consistency and standardization. While many methods have been developed, it is impossible to identify the current state-of-the-art, due to i) varying and small pretraining datasets, ii) varying architectures, and iii) being evaluated on differing downstream datasets. In this paper, we bring clarity to this field and lay the foundation for further method advancements through three key contributions: We a) publish the largest publicly available pre-training dataset comprising 114k 3D brain MRI volumes, enabling all practitioners to pre-train on a large-scale dataset. We b) benchmark existing 3D self-supervised learning methods on this dataset for a state-of-the-art CNN and Transformer architecture, clarifying the state of 3D SSL pre-training. Among many findings, we show that pre-trained methods can exceed a strong from-scratch nnU-Net ResEnc-L baseline. Lastly, we c) publish the code of our pre-training and fine-tuning frameworks and provide the pre-trained models created during the benchmarking process to facilitate rapid adoption and reproduction.

Geo-tagged images are publicly available in large quantities, whereas labels such as object classes are rather scarce and expensive to collect. Meanwhile, contrastive learning has achieved tremendous success in various natural image and language tasks with limited labeled data. However, existing methods fail to fully leverage geospatial information, which can be paramount to distinguishing objects that are visually similar. To directly leverage the abundant geospatial information associated with images in pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference stages, we present Contrastive Spatial Pre-Training (CSP), a self-supervised learning framework for geo-tagged images. We use a dual-encoder to separately encode the images and their corresponding geo-locations, and use contrastive objectives to learn effective location representations from images, which can be transferred to downstream supervised tasks such as image classification. Experiments show that CSP can improve model performance on both iNat2018 and fMoW datasets. Especially, on iNat2018, CSP significantly boosts the model performance with 10-34% relative improvement with various labeled training data sampling ratios.

Built on pretrained vision foundation models (VFMs), representation autoencoders (RAEs) have recently emerged as a promising approach for constructing semantically rich latent spaces for image generation. However, their reconstruction quality often remains suboptimal, largely because deep VFM representations do not preserve sufficient fine-grained visual detail. This limitation becomes even more severe after discretization, where missing low-level information is difficult to recover. In fact, we observe that shallow VFM features retain considerably richer local appearance and structural detail, which complements the high-level semantics carried by deep features used in existing RAEs. Motivated by this complementary property, we propose Ideal, an In-depth Alignment framework for discrete representation autoencoding. By jointly aligning quantized tokens with both shallow and deep VFM features, Ideal enables the resulting discrete visual tokens to preserve both visual fidelity and rich semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ideal yields superior reconstruction performance, achieving 0.61 rFID on ImageNet and outperforming the previous best method by 0.28. When used for autoregressive image generation, Ideal further produces a gFID of 1.89, establishing a new state of the art for autoregressive image generation.

3D asset generation is getting massive amounts of attention, inspired by the recent success of text-guided 2D content creation. Existing text-to-3D methods use pretrained text-to-image diffusion models in an optimization problem or fine-tune them on synthetic data, which often results in non-photorealistic 3D objects without backgrounds. In this paper, we present a method that leverages pretrained text-to-image models as a prior, and learn to generate multi-view images in a single denoising process from real-world data. Concretely, we propose to integrate 3D volume-rendering and cross-frame-attention layers into each block of the existing U-Net network of the text-to-image model. Moreover, we design an autoregressive generation that renders more 3D-consistent images at any viewpoint. We train our model on real-world datasets of objects and showcase its capabilities to generate instances with a variety of high-quality shapes and textures in authentic surroundings. Compared to the existing methods, the results generated by our method are consistent, and have favorable visual quality (-30% FID, -37% KID).

We propose GeoFormer, a Geometry-Aware Transformer architecture specifically designed for prestack seismic data. Unlike Vision Transformer, whose tokens are extracted from 2D patches and primarily encode visual patterns, GeoFormer is designed for prestack seismic data by explicitly incorporating acquisition geometry. Each seismic trace is represented by a 5D unit consisting of the waveform and four source-receiver coordinates, from which two geometric attributes are derived: offset and relative elevation, where relative elevation is the receiver elevation minus the source elevation. GeoFormer therefore performs trace-level tokenization, where each token combines the waveform with these geometric attributes. To exploit these geometric attributes, GeoFormer introduces three geometry injection mechanisms operating at different levels of the Transformer pipeline. At the token level, GeomMLP replaces the classification token with a per-trace geometric representation derived from offset and elevation. At the normalization level, GeomAdaLN replaces uniform layer normalization with geometry-conditioned feature modulation. At the attention level, GeomAttnBias injects a parameter-free physical prior that geometrically proximate traces should attend more to each other. We validate GeoFormer on first-arrival picking, a representative seismic processing task that relies heavily on acquisition geometry. Experiments on four field datasets demonstrate that GeoFormer outperforms Vision Transformer and two task-specific baselines. Crucially, GeoFormer maintains robust picking accuracy under strong noise because its trace-level tokens encode geometric attributes that provide a physical prior independent of waveform quality. Ablation studies confirm that GeomMLP, GeomAdaLN, and GeomAttnBias each contribute to GeoFormer's picking accuracy.

This paper introduces WeatherFormer, a transformer encoder-based model designed to learn robust weather features from minimal observations. It addresses the challenge of modeling complex weather dynamics from small datasets, a bottleneck for many prediction tasks in agriculture, epidemiology, and climate science. WeatherFormer was pretrained on a large pretraining dataset comprised of 39 years of satellite measurements across the Americas. With a novel pretraining task and fine-tuning, WeatherFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance in county-level soybean yield prediction and influenza forecasting. Technical innovations include a unique spatiotemporal encoding that captures geographical, annual, and seasonal variations, adapting the transformer architecture to continuous weather data, and a pretraining strategy to learn representations that are robust to missing weather features. This paper for the first time demonstrates the effectiveness of pretraining large transformer encoder models for weather-dependent applications across multiple domains.

We propose a novel approach to self-supervised learning of point cloud representations by differentiable neural rendering. Motivated by the fact that informative point cloud features should be able to encode rich geometry and appearance cues and render realistic images, we train a point-cloud encoder within a devised point-based neural renderer by comparing the rendered images with real images on massive RGB-D data. The learned point-cloud encoder can be easily integrated into various downstream tasks, including not only high-level tasks like 3D detection and segmentation, but low-level tasks like 3D reconstruction and image synthesis. Extensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to existing pre-training methods.

Self-supervised learning on large-scale Vision Transformers (ViTs) as pre-training methods has achieved promising downstream performance. Yet, how much these pre-training paradigms promote lightweight ViTs' performance is considerably less studied. In this work, we develop and benchmark several self-supervised pre-training methods on image classification tasks and some downstream dense prediction tasks. We surprisingly find that if proper pre-training is adopted, even vanilla lightweight ViTs show comparable performance to previous SOTA networks with delicate architecture design. It breaks the recently popular conception that vanilla ViTs are not suitable for vision tasks in lightweight regimes. We also point out some defects of such pre-training, e.g., failing to benefit from large-scale pre-training data and showing inferior performance on data-insufficient downstream tasks. Furthermore, we analyze and clearly show the effect of such pre-training by analyzing the properties of the layer representation and attention maps for related models. Finally, based on the above analyses, a distillation strategy during pre-training is developed, which leads to further downstream performance improvement for MAE-based pre-training. Code is available at https://github.com/wangsr126/mae-lite.

Generation of 3D data by deep neural network has been attracting increasing attention in the research community. The majority of extant works resort to regular representations such as volumetric grids or collection of images; however, these representations obscure the natural invariance of 3D shapes under geometric transformations and also suffer from a number of other issues. In this paper we address the problem of 3D reconstruction from a single image, generating a straight-forward form of output -- point cloud coordinates. Along with this problem arises a unique and interesting issue, that the groundtruth shape for an input image may be ambiguous. Driven by this unorthodox output form and the inherent ambiguity in groundtruth, we design architecture, loss function and learning paradigm that are novel and effective. Our final solution is a conditional shape sampler, capable of predicting multiple plausible 3D point clouds from an input image. In experiments not only can our system outperform state-of-the-art methods on single image based 3d reconstruction benchmarks; but it also shows a strong performance for 3d shape completion and promising ability in making multiple plausible predictions.

In this paper, we show that useful video representations can be learned from synthetic videos and natural images, without incorporating natural videos in the training. We propose a progression of video datasets synthesized by simple generative processes, that model a growing set of natural video properties (e.g. motion, acceleration, and shape transformations). The downstream performance of video models pre-trained on these generated datasets gradually increases with the dataset progression. A VideoMAE model pre-trained on our synthetic videos closes 97.2% of the performance gap on UCF101 action classification between training from scratch and self-supervised pre-training from natural videos, and outperforms the pre-trained model on HMDB51. Introducing crops of static images to the pre-training stage results in similar performance to UCF101 pre-training and outperforms the UCF101 pre-trained model on 11 out of 14 out-of-distribution datasets of UCF101-P. Analyzing the low-level properties of the datasets, we identify correlations between frame diversity, frame similarity to natural data, and downstream performance. Our approach provides a more controllable and transparent alternative to video data curation processes for pre-training.

Legged robots have the potential to expand the reach of autonomy beyond paved roads. In this work, we consider the difficult problem of locomotion on challenging terrains using a single forward-facing depth camera. Due to the partial observability of the problem, the robot has to rely on past observations to infer the terrain currently beneath it. To solve this problem, we follow the paradigm in computer vision that explicitly models the 3D geometry of the scene and propose Neural Volumetric Memory (NVM), a geometric memory architecture that explicitly accounts for the SE(3) equivariance of the 3D world. NVM aggregates feature volumes from multiple camera views by first bringing them back to the ego-centric frame of the robot. We test the learned visual-locomotion policy on a physical robot and show that our approach, which explicitly introduces geometric priors during training, offers superior performance than more na\"ive methods. We also include ablation studies and show that the representations stored in the neural volumetric memory capture sufficient geometric information to reconstruct the scene. Our project page with videos is https://rchalyang.github.io/NVM .

Vision-specific concepts such as "region" have played a key role in extending general machine learning frameworks to tasks like object detection. Given the success of region-based detectors for supervised learning and the progress of intra-image methods for contrastive learning, we explore the use of regions for reconstructive pre-training. Starting from Masked Autoencoding (MAE) both as a baseline and an inspiration, we propose a parallel pre-text task tailored to address the one-to-many mapping between images and regions. Since such regions can be generated in an unsupervised way, our approach (R-MAE) inherits the wide applicability from MAE, while being more "region-aware". We conduct thorough analyses during the development of R-MAE, and converge on a variant that is both effective and efficient (1.3% overhead over MAE). Moreover, it shows consistent quantitative improvements when generalized to various pre-training data and downstream detection and segmentation benchmarks. Finally, we provide extensive qualitative visualizations to enhance the understanding of R-MAE's behaviour and potential. Code will be made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/r-mae.

In recent years, the field of 3D self-supervised learning has witnessed significant progress, resulting in the emergence of Multi-Modality Masked AutoEncoders (MAE) methods that leverage both 2D images and 3D point clouds for pre-training. However, a notable limitation of these approaches is that they do not fully utilize the multi-view attributes inherent in 3D point clouds, which is crucial for a deeper understanding of 3D structures. Building upon this insight, we introduce a novel approach employing a 3D to multi-view masked autoencoder to fully harness the multi-modal attributes of 3D point clouds. To be specific, our method uses the encoded tokens from 3D masked point clouds to generate original point clouds and multi-view depth images across various poses. This approach not only enriches the model's comprehension of geometric structures but also leverages the inherent multi-modal properties of point clouds. Our experiments illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for different tasks and under different settings. Remarkably, our method outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts by a large margin in a variety of downstream tasks, including 3D object classification, few-shot learning, part segmentation, and 3D object detection. Code will be available at: https://github.com/Zhimin-C/Multiview-MAE

The polygon mesh representation of 3D data exhibits great flexibility, fast rendering speed, and storage efficiency, which is widely preferred in various applications. However, given its unstructured graph representation, the direct generation of high-fidelity 3D meshes is challenging. Fortunately, with a pre-defined ordering strategy, 3D meshes can be represented as sequences, and the generation process can be seamlessly treated as an auto-regressive problem. In this paper, we validate the Neural Coordinate Field (NeurCF), an explicit coordinate representation with implicit neural embeddings, is a simple-yet-effective representation for large-scale sequential mesh modeling. After that, we present MeshXL, a family of generative pre-trained auto-regressive models, which addresses the process of 3D mesh generation with modern large language model approaches. Extensive experiments show that MeshXL is able to generate high-quality 3D meshes, and can also serve as foundation models for various down-stream applications.

Field-based agricultural computer vision is important for precision agriculture, yet it largely depends on expensive annotations and costly adaptation of large pretrained models. We introduce AgriField-40K, a field-centric dataset curated from 17 public resources and covering diverse crops, weeds, and field conditions. Building on this, we present AgriMAE, a parameter-efficient continual pretraining baseline that adapts a masked autoencoder pretrained on natural images by training only lightweight adapters. We further explore semantic feature reconstruction as an alternative pretraining objective and evaluate transfer across multiple tasks. AgriMAE consistently improves downstream performance and can match or even outperform full fine-tuning while using up to 9times fewer trainable parameters, showing that AgriField-40K is a practical resource for continual pretraining in agricultural vision. Project page: https://dtu-pas.github.io/agrifield40k/

This paper aims to develop an accurate 3D geometry representation of satellite images using satellite-ground image pairs. Our focus is on the challenging problem of 3D-aware ground-views synthesis from a satellite image. We draw inspiration from the density field representation used in volumetric neural rendering and propose a new approach, called Sat2Density. Our method utilizes the properties of ground-view panoramas for the sky and non-sky regions to learn faithful density fields of 3D scenes in a geometric perspective. Unlike other methods that require extra depth information during training, our Sat2Density can automatically learn accurate and faithful 3D geometry via density representation without depth supervision. This advancement significantly improves the ground-view panorama synthesis task. Additionally, our study provides a new geometric perspective to understand the relationship between satellite and ground-view images in 3D space.