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Main Authors: Ramirez, David F., Overman, Tim L., Jaskie, Kristen, Kleine, Marv, Spanias, Andreas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10772
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author Ramirez, David F.
Overman, Tim L.
Jaskie, Kristen
Kleine, Marv
Spanias, Andreas
author_facet Ramirez, David F.
Overman, Tim L.
Jaskie, Kristen
Kleine, Marv
Spanias, Andreas
contents Large language-vision models (LLVM), such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4, have gained prominence as powerful tools for analyzing text and imagery. The merging of these data domains represents a significant paradigm shift with far-reaching implications for automatic target recognition (ATR). Recent transformer-based LLVM research has shown substantial improvements for geospatial perception tasks. Our study examines the application of LLVM to remote sensing image captioning and visual question-answering (VQA), with a specific focus on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. We examine newly published LLVM methods, including CLIP and LLaVA neural network transformer architectures. We have developed a work-in-progress SAR training and evaluation benchmark derived from the MSTAR Public Dataset. This has been extended to include descriptive text captions and question-answer pairs for VQA tasks. This challenge dataset is designed to push the boundaries of an LLVM in identifying nuanced ATR details in SAR imagery. Utilizing parameter-efficient fine-tuning, we train an LLVM method to identify fine-grained target qualities at 98% accuracy. We detail our data setup and experiments, addressing potential pitfalls that could lead to misleading conclusions. Accurately identifying and differentiating military vehicle types in SAR data poses a critical challenge, especially under complex environmental conditions. Mastering this target recognition skill may require a human analyst months of training and years of practice. This research represents a unique effort to apply LLVM to SAR applications, advancing machine-assisted remote sensing ATR for military and intelligence contexts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_10772
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards a Large Language-Vision Question Answering Model for MSTAR Automatic Target Recognition
Ramirez, David F.
Overman, Tim L.
Jaskie, Kristen
Kleine, Marv
Spanias, Andreas
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Image and Video Processing
Large language-vision models (LLVM), such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4, have gained prominence as powerful tools for analyzing text and imagery. The merging of these data domains represents a significant paradigm shift with far-reaching implications for automatic target recognition (ATR). Recent transformer-based LLVM research has shown substantial improvements for geospatial perception tasks. Our study examines the application of LLVM to remote sensing image captioning and visual question-answering (VQA), with a specific focus on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. We examine newly published LLVM methods, including CLIP and LLaVA neural network transformer architectures. We have developed a work-in-progress SAR training and evaluation benchmark derived from the MSTAR Public Dataset. This has been extended to include descriptive text captions and question-answer pairs for VQA tasks. This challenge dataset is designed to push the boundaries of an LLVM in identifying nuanced ATR details in SAR imagery. Utilizing parameter-efficient fine-tuning, we train an LLVM method to identify fine-grained target qualities at 98% accuracy. We detail our data setup and experiments, addressing potential pitfalls that could lead to misleading conclusions. Accurately identifying and differentiating military vehicle types in SAR data poses a critical challenge, especially under complex environmental conditions. Mastering this target recognition skill may require a human analyst months of training and years of practice. This research represents a unique effort to apply LLVM to SAR applications, advancing machine-assisted remote sensing ATR for military and intelligence contexts.
title Towards a Large Language-Vision Question Answering Model for MSTAR Automatic Target Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10772