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Main Authors: Wickrema, Charith, Mace, Eliza, Brown, Hunter, Cabrera, Heidys, Krall, Nick, O'Neill, Matthew, Sarkar, Shivangi, Weissman, Lowell, Hughes, Eric, Zarrella, Guido
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23903
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author Wickrema, Charith
Mace, Eliza
Brown, Hunter
Cabrera, Heidys
Krall, Nick
O'Neill, Matthew
Sarkar, Shivangi
Weissman, Lowell
Hughes, Eric
Zarrella, Guido
author_facet Wickrema, Charith
Mace, Eliza
Brown, Hunter
Cabrera, Heidys
Krall, Nick
O'Neill, Matthew
Sarkar, Shivangi
Weissman, Lowell
Hughes, Eric
Zarrella, Guido
contents We explore the scaling behaviors of artificial intelligence to establish practical techniques for training foundation models on high-resolution electro-optical (EO) datasets that exceed the current state-of-the-art scale by orders of magnitude. Modern multimodal machine learning (ML) applications, such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) systems for image captioning, search, and reasoning, depend on robust, domain-specialized encoders for non-text modalities. In natural image domains where internet-scale data is plentiful, well-established scaling laws help optimize the joint scaling of model capacity, training compute, and dataset size. Unfortunately, these relationships are much less well understood in high-value domains like remote sensing (RS). Using over a quadrillion pixels of commercial satellite EO data and MITRE's Federal AI Sandbox, we train progressively larger vision transformer (ViT) backbones, report successes and failure modes observed at peta-scale, and analyze implications for bridging domain gaps across additional RS modalities. We observe that even at this scale, performance is consistent with a data-limited regime rather than a model parameter-limited one. These practical insights are intended to inform data collection strategies, compute budgets, and optimization schedules that advance the future development of frontier scale RS foundation models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23903
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scaling Remote Sensing Foundation Models: Data Domain Tradeoffs at the Peta-Scale
Wickrema, Charith
Mace, Eliza
Brown, Hunter
Cabrera, Heidys
Krall, Nick
O'Neill, Matthew
Sarkar, Shivangi
Weissman, Lowell
Hughes, Eric
Zarrella, Guido
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We explore the scaling behaviors of artificial intelligence to establish practical techniques for training foundation models on high-resolution electro-optical (EO) datasets that exceed the current state-of-the-art scale by orders of magnitude. Modern multimodal machine learning (ML) applications, such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) systems for image captioning, search, and reasoning, depend on robust, domain-specialized encoders for non-text modalities. In natural image domains where internet-scale data is plentiful, well-established scaling laws help optimize the joint scaling of model capacity, training compute, and dataset size. Unfortunately, these relationships are much less well understood in high-value domains like remote sensing (RS). Using over a quadrillion pixels of commercial satellite EO data and MITRE's Federal AI Sandbox, we train progressively larger vision transformer (ViT) backbones, report successes and failure modes observed at peta-scale, and analyze implications for bridging domain gaps across additional RS modalities. We observe that even at this scale, performance is consistent with a data-limited regime rather than a model parameter-limited one. These practical insights are intended to inform data collection strategies, compute budgets, and optimization schedules that advance the future development of frontier scale RS foundation models.
title Scaling Remote Sensing Foundation Models: Data Domain Tradeoffs at the Peta-Scale
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23903