Chia-Yu Hsu

Chia-Yu Hsu, Wenwen Li, Sizhe Wang

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.

Wenwen Li, Sizhe Wang, Hyunho Lee et al.

Landslides cause severe damage to lives, infrastructure, and the environment, making accurate and timely mapping essential for disaster preparedness and response. However, conventional deep learning models often struggle when applied across different sensors, regions, or under conditions of limited training data. To address these challenges, we present a three-axis analytical framework of sensor, label, and domain for adapting geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs), focusing on Prithvi-EO-2.0 for landslide mapping. Through a series of experiments, we show that it consistently outperforms task-specific CNNs (U-Net, U-Net++), vision transformers (Segformer, SwinV2-B), and other GeoFMs (TerraMind, SatMAE). The model, built on global pretraining, self-supervision, and adaptable fine-tuning, proved resilient to spectral variation, maintained accuracy under label scarcity, and generalized more reliably across diverse datasets and geographic settings. Alongside these strengths, we also highlight remaining challenges such as computational cost and the limited availability of reusable AI-ready training data for landslide research. Overall, our study positions GeoFMs as a step toward more robust and scalable approaches for landslide risk reduction and environmental monitoring.

Wenwen Li, Chia-Yu Hsu, Sizhe Wang et al.

GeoAI has emerged as an exciting interdisciplinary research area that combines spatial theories and data with cutting-edge AI models to address geospatial problems in a novel, data-driven manner. While GeoAI research has flourished in the GIScience literature, its reproducibility and replicability (R&R), fundamental principles that determine the reusability, reliability, and scientific rigor of research findings, have rarely been discussed. This paper aims to provide an in-depth analysis of this topic from both computational and spatial perspectives. We first categorize the major goals for reproducing GeoAI research, namely, validation (repeatability), learning and adapting the method for solving a similar or new problem (reproducibility), and examining the generalizability of the research findings (replicability). Each of these goals requires different levels of understanding of GeoAI, as well as different methods to ensure its success. We then discuss the factors that may cause the lack of R&R in GeoAI research, with an emphasis on (1) the selection and use of training data; (2) the uncertainty that resides in the GeoAI model design, training, deployment, and inference processes; and more importantly (3) the inherent spatial heterogeneity of geospatial data and processes. We use a deep learning-based image analysis task as an example to demonstrate the results' uncertainty and spatial variance caused by different factors. The findings reiterate the importance of knowledge sharing, as well as the generation of a "replicability map" that incorporates spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity into consideration in quantifying the spatial replicability of GeoAI research.