UHR-Micro: Diagnosing and Mitigating the Resolution Illusion in Earth Observation VLMs
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly operate on ultra-high-resolution (UHR) Earth observation imagery, yet they remain vulnerable to a severe scale mismatch between large-scale scene context and micro-scale targets. We refer to this empirical gap as a "resolution illusion": higher input resolution provides the appearance of richer visual detail, but does not necessarily yield reliable perception of spatially small, task-relevant evidence. To benchmark this challenge, we introduce UHR-Micro, a benchmark comprising 11,253 instructions grounded in 1,212 UHR images, designed to evaluate VLMs at the spatial limits of native Earth observation imagery. UHR-Micro spans diverse micro-target scales, context requirements, task families, and visual conditions, and provides diagnostic annotations that support controlled evaluation and fine-grained error attribution. Experiments with representative high-resolution VLMs show substantial failures in spatial grounding and evidence parsing, despite access to high-resolution inputs. Further analysis suggests that these failures are not fully resolved by increasing model capacity, but are closely tied to insufficient guidance in locating and using task-relevant micro-evidence. Motivated by this finding, we propose Micro-evidence Active Perception (MAP), a reference agent that decomposes queries into evidence-seeking steps, actively inspects candidate regions, and grounds its answers in localized observations. MAP-Agent improves micro-level perception by making high-resolution reasoning evidence-centered rather than image-centered. Together, UHR-Micro and MAP-Agent provide a diagnostic platform for evaluating, understanding, and advancing high-resolution reasoning in Earth observation VLMs. Datasets and source code were released at https://github.com/MiliLab/UHR-Micro.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
A quantitative analysis of tilt in the Café Wall illusion: a bioplausible model for foveal and peripheral vision
The biological characteristics of human visual processing can be investigated through the study of optical illusions and their perception, giving rise to intuitions that may improve computer vision to match human perform…
A Comprehensive Survey on Root Cause Analysis in (Micro) Services: Methodologies, Challenges, and Trends
The complex dependencies and propagative faults inherent in microservices, characterized by a dense network of interconnected services, pose significant challenges in identifying the underlying causes of issues. Prompt i…
R-Diverse: Mitigating Diversity Illusion in Self-Play LLM Training
Self-play bootstraps LLM reasoning through an iterative Challenger-Solver loop: the Challenger is trained to generate questions that target the Solver's capabilities, and the Solver is optimized on the generated data to …
Beyond Shortcuts: Mitigating Visual Illusions in Frozen VLMs via Qualitative Reasoning
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in general visual tasks, their perceptual robustness remains remarkably brittle when confronted with optical illusions. These failures are of…
Visual GroundingMachine Learning-Assisted Microearthquake Location Workflow for Monitoring the Newberry Enhanced Geothermal System
Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) offer a sustainable energy source but face challenges in accurately locating microearthquakes induced during reservoir stimulation. Locating these microearthquakes provides reliable feed…