{"paper":{"title":"No One Knows the State of the Art in Geospatial Foundation Models","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"Nobody knows the state of the art in geospatial foundation models because papers cannot be compared.","cross_cats":["cs.CY"],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Anthony Fuller, Caleb Robinson, Evan Shelhamer, Gabriel Tseng, Hamed Alemohammad, Hannah Kerner, Isaac Corley, Jennifer Marcus, Nils Lehmann","submitted_at":"2026-05-12T19:29:51Z","abstract_excerpt":"Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) have been proposed as generalizable backbones for disaster response, land-cover mapping, food-security monitoring, and other high-stakes Earth-observation tasks. Yet the published work about these models does not give reviewers or users enough information to tell which model fits a given task. We argue that nobody knows what the current state of the art is in geospatial foundation models. The methods may be useful, but the GFM literature does not standardize evaluations, training and testing protocols, released weights, or pretraining controls well enough fo"},"claims":{"count":4,"items":[{"kind":"strongest_claim","text":"We argue that nobody knows what the current state of the art is in geospatial foundation models.","source":"verdict.strongest_claim","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C1","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"weakest_assumption","text":"That the 152-paper sample is representative of the full GFM literature and that the observed disagreements stem primarily from missing standards rather than other unmeasured factors.","source":"verdict.weakest_assumption","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C2","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"one_line_summary","text":"An audit of 152 papers reveals that geospatial foundation models lack standardized evaluations, training controls, and weight releases, so no one knows the state of the art.","source":"verdict.one_line_summary","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C3","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"headline","text":"Nobody knows the state of the art in geospatial foundation models because papers cannot be compared.","source":"verdict.pith_extraction.headline","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C4","attestation":"unclaimed"}],"snapshot_sha256":"ac2abc40bcf8cd11419cb9506ec9e86e1254c0c1e463004f0fc0e91db8734443"},"source":{"id":"2605.12678","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":"761902a8-858e-4327-96d1-e27c0ccf825c","model_set":{"reader":"grok-4.3"},"created_at":"2026-05-14T21:01:58.910678Z","strongest_claim":"We argue that nobody knows what the current state of the art is in geospatial foundation models.","one_line_summary":"An audit of 152 papers reveals that geospatial foundation models lack standardized evaluations, training controls, and weight releases, so no one knows the state of the art.","pipeline_version":"pith-pipeline@v0.9.0","weakest_assumption":"That the 152-paper sample is representative of the full GFM literature and that the observed disagreements stem primarily from missing standards rather than other unmeasured factors.","pith_extraction_headline":"Nobody knows the state of the art in geospatial foundation models because papers cannot be compared."},"references":{"count":80,"sample":[{"doi":"","year":2024,"title":"Omnisat: Self- supervised modality fusion for earth observation","work_id":"3598560f-1212-4c51-b9f1-01949dad899a","ref_index":1,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":2025,"title":"Anysat: One earth observation model for many resolutions, scales, and modalities","work_id":"119f2590-facb-4403-b817-c656fe179c23","ref_index":2,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":2023,"title":"Satlaspretrain: A large-scale dataset for remote sensing image understanding","work_id":"f5130711-cf5d-401f-8fb8-7ef5d63c5a63","ref_index":3,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":2025,"title":"Olmoearth: Stable latent image modeling for multimodal earth observation","work_id":"39985f20-f64a-4024-b898-83be61ca9c84","ref_index":4,"cited_arxiv_id":"","is_internal_anchor":false},{"doi":"","year":2021,"title":"On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models","work_id":"a18039e9-928d-47c9-a836-32656a71bf71","ref_index":5,"cited_arxiv_id":"2108.07258","is_internal_anchor":true}],"resolved_work":80,"snapshot_sha256":"f49bd40738991fb858327d11b4d8cd03a3f6f81936f75224a25d9da2d65db8e6","internal_anchors":6},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}