A Parameter-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Cross-Modal Geo-Localization
This addresses geo-localization for drone navigation, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like BGE-M3 and EVA-CLIP with domain-specific adaptations.
The paper tackled cross-modal geo-localization by retrieving geo-referenced images from a multi-platform corpus using natural-language queries, achieving top performance on the RoboSense 2025 leaderboard.
We present a winning solution to RoboSense 2025 Track 4: Cross-Modal Drone Navigation. The task retrieves the most relevant geo-referenced image from a large multi-platform corpus (satellite/drone/ground) given a natural-language query. Two obstacles are severe inter-platform heterogeneity and a domain gap between generic training descriptions and platform-specific test queries. We mitigate these with a domain-aligned preprocessing pipeline and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework: (i) platform-wise partitioning, satellite augmentation, and removal of orientation words; (ii) an LLM-based caption refinement pipeline to align textual semantics with the distinct visual characteristics of each platform. Using BGE-M3 (text) and EVA-CLIP (image), we train three platform experts using a progressive two-stage, hard-negative mining strategy to enhance discriminative power, and fuse their scores at inference. The system tops the official leaderboard, demonstrating robust cross-modal geo-localization under heterogeneous viewpoints.