Papers › Foundation Models for Generalist Geospatial Artificial Intelligence
Foundation Models for Generalist Geospatial Artificial Intelligence
Johannes Jakubik, Sujit Roy, C. E. Phillips, Paolo Fraccaro, Denys Godwin, Bianca Zadrozny, Daniela Szwarcman, Carlos Gomes, Gabby Nyirjesy, Blair Edwards, Daiki Kimura, Naomi Simumba, Linsong Chu, S. Karthik Mukkavilli, Devyani Lambhate, Kamal Das, Ranjini Bangalore, Dario Oliveira, Michal Muszynski, Kumar Ankur, Muthukumaran Ramasubramanian, Iksha Gurung, Sam Khallaghi, Hanxi, Li, Michael Cecil, Maryam Ahmadi, Fatemeh Kordi, Hamed Alemohammad, Manil Maskey, Raghu Ganti, Kommy Weldemariam, Rahul Ramachandran
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.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections