GeoLLaVA-8K: Scaling Remote-Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models to 8K Resolution
Fengxiang Wang, Mingshuo Chen, Yueying Li, Di Wang, Haotian Wang, Zonghao Guo, Zefan Wang, Shan Boqi, Long Lan, Yulin Wang, Hongzhen Wang, Wenjing Yang, Bo Du, Jing Zhang
Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing (RS) imagery offers valuable data for Earth observation but pose challenges for existing multimodal foundation models due to two key bottlenecks: (1) limited availability of UHR training data, and (2) token explosion caused by the large image size. To address data scarcity, we introduce **SuperRS-VQA** (avg. 8,376$\times$8,376) and **HighRS-VQA** (avg. 2,000$\times$1,912), the highest-resolution vision-language datasets in RS to date, covering 22 real-world dialogue tasks. To mitigate token explosion, our pilot studies reveal significant redundancy in RS images: crucial information is concentrated in a small subset of object-centric tokens, while pruning background tokens (e.g., ocean or forest) can even improve performance.Motivated by these findings, we propose two strategies: *Background Token Pruning* and *Anchored Token Selection*, to reduce the memory footprint while preserving key semantics.Integrating these techniques, we introduce **GeoLLaVA-8K**, the first RS-focused multimodal large language model capable of handling inputs up to 8K$\times$8K resolution, built on the LLaVA framework. Trained on SuperRS-VQA and HighRS-VQA, GeoLLaVA-8K sets a new state-of-the-art on the XLRS-Bench. Datasets and code will be released.