Daily Papers

Geo-Foundational Models (GFMs) enable fast and reliable extraction of spatiotemporal information from satellite imagery, improving flood inundation mapping by leveraging location and time embeddings. Despite their potential, it remains unclear whether GFMs outperform traditional models like U-Net. A systematic comparison across sensors and data availability scenarios is still lacking, which is an essential step to guide end-users in model selection. To address this, we evaluate three GFMs, Prithvi 2.0, Clay V1.5, DOFA, and UViT (a Prithvi variant), against TransNorm, U-Net, and Attention U-Net using PlanetScope, Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2. We observe competitive performance among all GFMs, with only 2-5% variation between the best and worst models across sensors. Clay outperforms others on PlanetScope (0.79 mIoU) and Sentinel-2 (0.70), while Prithvi leads on Sentinel-1 (0.57). In leave-one-region-out cross-validation across five regions, Clay shows slightly better performance across all sensors (mIoU: 0.72(0.04), 0.66(0.07), 0.51(0.08)) compared to Prithvi (0.70(0.05), 0.64(0.09), 0.49(0.13)) and DOFA (0.67(0.07), 0.64(0.04), 0.49(0.09)) for PlanetScope, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-1, respectively. Across all 19 sites, leave-one-region-out cross-validation reveals a 4% improvement by Clay compared to U-Net. Visual inspection highlights Clay's superior ability to retain fine details. Few-shot experiments show Clay achieves 0.64 mIoU on PlanetScope with just five training images, outperforming Prithvi (0.24) and DOFA (0.35). In terms of computational time, Clay is a better choice due to its smaller model size (26M parameters), making it ~3x faster than Prithvi (650M) and 2x faster than DOFA (410M). Contrary to previous findings, our results suggest GFMs offer small to moderate improvements in flood mapping accuracy at lower computational cost and labeling effort compared to traditional U-Net.

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.

Rapid climate change and other disturbances in alpine ecosystems demand frequent habitat monitoring, yet manual mapping remains prohibitively expensive for the required temporal resolution. We employ deep learning for change detection using long-term alpine habitat data from Gesaeuse National Park, Austria, addressing a major gap in applying geospatial foundation models (GFMs) to complex natural environments with fuzzy class boundaries and highly imbalanced classes. We compare two paradigms: post-classification change detection (CD) versus direct CD. For post-classification CD, we evaluate GFMs Prithvi-EO-2.0 and Clay v1.0 against U-Net CNNs; for direct CD, we test the transformer ChangeViT against U-Net baselines. Using high-resolution multimodal data (RGB, NIR, LiDAR, terrain attributes) covering 4,480 documented changes over 15.3 km2, results show Clay v1.0 achieves 51% overall accuracy versus U-Net's 41% for multi-class habitat change, while both reach 67% for binary change detection. Direct CD yields superior IoU (0.53 vs 0.35) for binary but only 28% accuracy for multi-class detection. Cross-temporal evaluation reveals GFM robustness, with Clay maintaining 33% accuracy on 2020 data versus U-Net's 23%. Integrating LiDAR improves semantic segmentation from 30% to 50% accuracy. Although overall accuracies are lower than in more homogeneous landscapes, they reflect realistic performance for complex alpine habitats. Future work will integrate object-based post-processing and physical constraints to enhance applicability.

Research on geospatial foundation models (GFMs) has become a trending topic in geospatial artificial intelligence (AI) research due to their potential for achieving high generalizability and domain adaptability, reducing model training costs for individual researchers. Unlike large language models, such as ChatGPT, constructing visual foundation models for image analysis, particularly in remote sensing, encountered significant challenges such as formulating diverse vision tasks into a general problem framework. This paper evaluates the recently released NASA-IBM GFM Prithvi for its predictive performance on high-level image analysis tasks across multiple benchmark datasets. Prithvi was selected because it is one of the first open-source GFMs trained on time-series of high-resolution remote sensing imagery. A series of experiments were designed to assess Prithvi's performance as compared to other pre-trained task-specific AI models in geospatial image analysis. New strategies, including band adaptation, multi-scale feature generation, and fine-tuning techniques, are introduced and integrated into an image analysis pipeline to enhance Prithvi's domain adaptation capability and improve model performance. In-depth analyses reveal Prithvi's strengths and weaknesses, offering insights for both improving Prithvi and developing future visual foundation models for geospatial tasks.

Foundation Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 represent a revolution in AI due to their real-world applications though natural language processing. However, they also pose many significant risks such as the presence of biased, private, or harmful text, and the unauthorized inclusion of copyrighted material. We introduce h2oGPT, a suite of open-source code repositories for the creation and use of Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs). The goal of this project is to create the world's best truly open-source alternative to closed-source GPTs. In collaboration with and as part of the incredible and unstoppable open-source community, we open-source several fine-tuned h2oGPT models from 7 to 40 Billion parameters, ready for commercial use under fully permissive Apache 2.0 licenses. Included in our release is 100% private document search using natural language. Open-source language models help boost AI development and make it more accessible and trustworthy. They lower entry hurdles, allowing people and groups to tailor these models to their needs. This openness increases innovation, transparency, and fairness. An open-source strategy is needed to share AI benefits fairly, and H2O.ai will continue to democratize AI and LLMs.

Triggered by the realization that AI emulators can rival the performance of traditional numerical weather prediction models running on HPC systems, there is now an increasing number of large AI models that address use cases such as forecasting, downscaling, or nowcasting. While the parallel developments in the AI literature focus on foundation models -- models that can be effectively tuned to address multiple, different use cases -- the developments on the weather and climate side largely focus on single-use cases with particular emphasis on mid-range forecasting. We close this gap by introducing Prithvi WxC, a 2.3 billion parameter foundation model developed using 160 variables from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). Prithvi WxC employs an encoder-decoder-based architecture, incorporating concepts from various recent transformer models to effectively capture both regional and global dependencies in the input data. The model has been designed to accommodate large token counts to model weather phenomena in different topologies at fine resolutions. Furthermore, it is trained with a mixed objective that combines the paradigms of masked reconstruction with forecasting. We test the model on a set of challenging downstream tasks namely: Autoregressive rollout forecasting, Downscaling, Gravity wave flux parameterization, and Extreme events estimation. The pretrained model with 2.3 billion parameters, along with the associated fine-tuning workflows, has been publicly released as an open-source contribution via Hugging Face.

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.