Aybora Koksal

Aybora Koksal, A. Aydin Alatan

Remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating text-image content have been demonstrated by recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, their effectiveness in specialized domains-particularly those requiring resource-efficient and domain-specific adaptations-has remained limited. In this work, a lightweight multimodal language model termed MilChat is introduced, specifically adapted to analyze remote sensing imagery in secluded areas, including challenging missile launch sites. A new dataset, MilData, was compiled by verifying hundreds of aerial images through expert review, and subtle military installations were highlighted via detailed captions. Supervised fine-tuning on a 2B-parameter open-source MLLM with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning annotations was performed, enabling more accurate and interpretable explanations. Additionally, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was leveraged to enhance the model's ability to detect critical domain-specific cues-such as defensive layouts and key military structures-while minimizing false positives on civilian scenes. Through empirical evaluations, it has been shown that MilChat significantly outperforms both larger, general-purpose multimodal models and existing remote sensing-adapted approaches on open-ended captioning and classification metrics. Over 80% recall and 98% precision were achieved on the newly proposed MilData benchmark, underscoring the potency of targeted fine-tuning and reinforcement learning in specialized real-world applications.

Aybora Koksal, A. Aydin Alatan

Remote-sensing applications often run on edge hardware that cannot host today's 7B-parameter multimodal language models. This paper introduces TinyRS, the first 2B-parameter multimodal small language model (MSLM) optimized for remote sensing tasks, and TinyRS-R1, its reasoning-augmented variant. Built upon Qwen2-VL-2B, TinyRS is trained through a four-stage pipeline: pre-training on million satellite images, instruction tuning on visual instruction examples, fine-tuning with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations from the proposed reasoning dataset, and alignment via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). TinyRS-R1 achieves or surpasses the performance of recent 7B-parameter remote sensing models across classification, VQA, visual grounding, and open-ended question answering-while requiring just one-third of the memory and latency. Our analysis shows that CoT reasoning substantially benefits spatial grounding and scene understanding, while the non-reasoning TinyRS excels in concise, latency-sensitive VQA tasks. TinyRS-R1 represents the first domain-specialized MSLM with GRPO-aligned CoT reasoning for general-purpose remote sensing.

Aybora Koksal, A. Aydin Alatan

Recent advances in large language and vision-language models have enabled strong reasoning capabilities, yet they remain impractical for specialized domains like remote sensing, where annotated data is scarce and expensive. We present the first few-shot reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) framework for satellite imagery that eliminates the need for caption supervision--relying solely on lightweight, rule-based binary or IoU-based rewards. Adapting the "1-shot RLVR" paradigm from language models to vision-language models, we employ policy-gradient optimization with as few as one curated example to align model outputs for satellite reasoning tasks. Comprehensive experiments across multiple remote sensing benchmarks--including classification, visual question answering, and grounding--show that even a single example yields substantial improvements over the base model. Scaling to 128 examples matches or exceeds models trained on thousands of annotated samples. While the extreme one-shot setting can induce mild, task-specific overfitting, our approach consistently demonstrates robust generalization and efficiency across diverse tasks. Further, we find that prompt design and loss weighting significantly influence training stability and final accuracy. Our method enables cost-effective and data-efficient development of domain-specialist vision-language reasoning models, offering a pragmatic recipe for data-scarce fields: start from a compact VLM, curate a handful of reward-checkable cases, and train via RLVR.

Aybora Koksal, Onder Tuzcuoglu, Kutalmis Gokalp Ince et al.

Hard example mining methods generally improve the performance of the object detectors, which suffer from imbalanced training sets. In this work, two existing hard example mining approaches (LRM and focal loss, FL) are adapted and combined in a state-of-the-art real-time object detector, YOLOv5. The effectiveness of the proposed approach for improving the performance on hard examples is extensively evaluated. The proposed method increases mAP by 3% compared to using the original loss function and around 1-2% compared to using the hard-mining methods (LRM or FL) individually on 2021 Anti-UAV Challenge Dataset.

Kutalmis Gokalp Ince, Aybora Koksal, Arda Fazla et al.

We propose a semi-automatic bounding box annotation method for visual object tracking by utilizing temporal information with a tracking-by-detection approach. For detection, we use an off-the-shelf object detector which is trained iteratively with the annotations generated by the proposed method, and we perform object detection on each frame independently. We employ Multiple Hypothesis Tracking (MHT) to exploit temporal information and to reduce the number of false-positives which makes it possible to use lower objectness thresholds for detection to increase recall. The tracklets formed by MHT are evaluated by human operators to enlarge the training set. This novel incremental learning approach helps to perform annotation iteratively. The experiments performed on AUTH Multidrone Dataset reveal that the annotation workload can be reduced up to 96% by the proposed approach.

Aybora Koksal, Kutalmis Gokalp Ince, A. Aydin Alatan

Following the recent advances in deep networks, object detection and tracking algorithms with deep learning backbones have been improved significantly; however, this rapid development resulted in the necessity of large amounts of annotated labels. Even if the details of such semi-automatic annotation processes for most of these datasets are not known precisely, especially for the video annotations, some automated labeling processes are usually employed. Unfortunately, such approaches might result with erroneous annotations. In this work, different types of annotation errors for object detection problem are simulated and the performance of a popular state-of-the-art object detector, YOLOv3, with erroneous annotations during training and testing stages is examined. Moreover, some inevitable annotation errors in CVPR-2020 Anti-UAV Challenge dataset is also examined in this manner, while proposing a solution to correct such annotation errors of this valuable data set.