Prithvi-EO-2.0: A Versatile Multi-Temporal Foundation Model for Earth Observation Applications

This technical report presents Prithvi-EO-2.0, a new geospatial foundation model that offers significant improvements over its predecessor, Prithvi-EO-1.0. Trained on 4.2M global time series samples from NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 data archive at 30m resolution, the new 300M and 600M parameter models incorporate temporal and location embeddings for enhanced performance across various geospatial tasks. Through extensive benchmarking with GEO-Bench, the 600M version outperforms the previous Prithvi-EO model by 8\% across a range of tasks. It also outperforms six other geospatial foundation models when benchmarked on remote sensing tasks from different domains and resolutions (i.e. from 0.1m to 15m). The results demonstrate the versatility of the model in both classical earth observation and high-resolution applications. Early involvement of end-users and subject matter experts (SMEs) are among the key factors that contributed to the project's success. In particular, SME involvement allowed for constant feedback on model and dataset design, as well as successful customization for diverse SME-led applications in disaster response, land use and crop mapping, and ecosystem dynamics monitoring. Prithvi-EO-2.0 is available on Hugging Face and IBM terratorch, with additional resources on GitHub. The project exemplifies the Trusted Open Science approach embraced by all involved organizations.

Multi-Spectral Remote Sensing Image Retrieval Using Geospatial Foundation Models

Image retrieval enables an efficient search through vast amounts of satellite imagery and returns similar images to a query. Deep learning models can identify images across various semantic concepts without the need for annotations. This work proposes to use Geospatial Foundation Models, like Prithvi, for remote sensing image retrieval with multiple benefits: i) the models encode multi-spectral satellite data and ii) generalize without further fine-tuning. We introduce two datasets to the retrieval task and observe a strong performance: Prithvi processes six bands and achieves a mean Average Precision of 97.62\% on BigEarthNet-43 and 44.51\% on ForestNet-12, outperforming other RGB-based models. Further, we evaluate three compression methods with binarized embeddings balancing retrieval speed and accuracy. They match the retrieval speed of much shorter hash codes while maintaining the same accuracy as floating-point embeddings but with a 32-fold compression. The code is available at https://github.com/IBM/remote-sensing-image-retrieval.

TensorBank:Tensor Lakehouse for Foundation Model Training

Storing and streaming high dimensional data for foundation model training became a critical requirement with the rise of foundation models beyond natural language. In this paper we introduce TensorBank, a petabyte scale tensor lakehouse capable of streaming tensors from Cloud Object Store (COS) to GPU memory at wire speed based on complex relational queries. We use Hierarchical Statistical Indices (HSI) for query acceleration. Our architecture allows to directly address tensors on block level using HTTP range reads. Once in GPU memory, data can be transformed using PyTorch transforms. We provide a generic PyTorch dataset type with a corresponding dataset factory translating relational queries and requested transformations as an instance. By making use of the HSI, irrelevant blocks can be skipped without reading them as those indices contain statistics on their content at different hierarchical resolution levels. This is an opinionated architecture powered by open standards and making heavy use of open-source technology. Although, hardened for production use using geospatial-temporal data, this architecture generalizes to other use case like computer vision, computational neuroscience, biological sequence analysis and more.

What a MESS: Multi-Domain Evaluation of Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation

While semantic segmentation has seen tremendous improvements in the past, there is still significant labeling efforts necessary and the problem of limited generalization to classes that have not been present during training. To address this problem, zero-shot semantic segmentation makes use of large self-supervised vision-language models, allowing zero-shot transfer to unseen classes. In this work, we build a benchmark for Multi-domain Evaluation of Semantic Segmentation (MESS), which allows a holistic analysis of performance across a wide range of domain-specific datasets such as medicine, engineering, earth monitoring, biology, and agriculture. To do this, we reviewed 120 datasets, developed a taxonomy, and classified the datasets according to the developed taxonomy. We select a representative subset consisting of 22 datasets and propose it as the MESS benchmark. We evaluate eight recently published models on the proposed MESS benchmark and analyze characteristics for the performance of zero-shot transfer models. The toolkit is available at https://github.com/blumenstiel/MESS.

Instance Selection Mechanisms for Human-in-the-Loop Systems in Few-Shot Learning

Business analytics and machine learning have become essential success factors for various industries - with the downside of cost-intensive gathering and labeling of data. Few-shot learning addresses this challenge and reduces data gathering and labeling costs by learning novel classes with very few labeled data. In this paper, we design a human-in-the-loop (HITL) system for few-shot learning and analyze an extensive range of mechanisms that can be used to acquire human expert knowledge for instances that have an uncertain prediction outcome. We show that the acquisition of human expert knowledge significantly accelerates the few-shot model performance given a negligible labeling effort. We validate our findings in various experiments on a benchmark dataset in computer vision and real-world datasets. We further demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of HITL systems for few-shot learning. Overall, our work aims at supporting researchers and practitioners in effectively adapting machine learning models to novel classes at reduced costs.