OSMDA: OpenStreetMap-based Domain Adaptation for Remote Sensing VLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ailuro, Stefan Maria, Markov, Mario, Mahdi, Mohammad, Boychev, Delyan, Van Gool, Luc, Paudel, Danda Pani
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Ailuro, Stefan Maria
Markov, Mario
Mahdi, Mohammad
Boychev, Delyan
Van Gool, Luc
Paudel, Danda Pani
author_facet Ailuro, Stefan Maria
Markov, Mario
Mahdi, Mohammad
Boychev, Delyan
Van Gool, Luc
Paudel, Danda Pani
contents Vision-Language Models (VLMs) adapted to remote sensing rely heavily on domain-specific image-text supervision, yet high-quality annotations for satellite and aerial imagery remain scarce and expensive to produce. Prevailing pseudo-labeling pipelines address this gap by distilling knowledge from large frontier models, but this dependence on large teachers is costly, limits scalability, and caps achievable performance at the ceiling of the teacher. We propose OSMDA: a self-contained domain adaptation framework that eliminates this dependency. Our key insight is that a capable base VLM can serve as its own annotation engine: by pairing aerial images with rendered OpenStreetMap (OSM) tiles, we leverage optical character recognition and chart comprehension capabilities of the model to generate captions enriched by OSM's vast auxiliary metadata. The model is then fine-tuned on the resulting corpus with satellite imagery alone, yielding OSMDA-VLM, a domain-adapted VLM that requires no manual labeling and no stronger external model. We conduct exhaustive evaluations spanning 10 benchmarks across image-text-to-text tasks and comparing against 9 competitive baselines. When equally mixed with real data, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, while being substantially cheaper to train than teacher-dependent alternatives. These results suggest that, given a strong foundation model, alignment with crowd-sourced geographic data is a practical and scalable path towards remote sensing domain adaptation. Dataset and model weights will be made publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_11804
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OSMDA: OpenStreetMap-based Domain Adaptation for Remote Sensing VLMs
Ailuro, Stefan Maria
Markov, Mario
Mahdi, Mohammad
Boychev, Delyan
Van Gool, Luc
Paudel, Danda Pani
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) adapted to remote sensing rely heavily on domain-specific image-text supervision, yet high-quality annotations for satellite and aerial imagery remain scarce and expensive to produce. Prevailing pseudo-labeling pipelines address this gap by distilling knowledge from large frontier models, but this dependence on large teachers is costly, limits scalability, and caps achievable performance at the ceiling of the teacher. We propose OSMDA: a self-contained domain adaptation framework that eliminates this dependency. Our key insight is that a capable base VLM can serve as its own annotation engine: by pairing aerial images with rendered OpenStreetMap (OSM) tiles, we leverage optical character recognition and chart comprehension capabilities of the model to generate captions enriched by OSM's vast auxiliary metadata. The model is then fine-tuned on the resulting corpus with satellite imagery alone, yielding OSMDA-VLM, a domain-adapted VLM that requires no manual labeling and no stronger external model. We conduct exhaustive evaluations spanning 10 benchmarks across image-text-to-text tasks and comparing against 9 competitive baselines. When equally mixed with real data, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, while being substantially cheaper to train than teacher-dependent alternatives. These results suggest that, given a strong foundation model, alignment with crowd-sourced geographic data is a practical and scalable path towards remote sensing domain adaptation. Dataset and model weights will be made publicly available.
title OSMDA: OpenStreetMap-based Domain Adaptation for Remote Sensing VLMs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11804