Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), while powerful, often struggle in Remote Sensing (RS) segmentation tasks when combined with existing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods. We observe that this limitation primarily arises from their inability to effectively handle the pervasive artifacts in RS imagery. To address this, we introduce Earth-Adapter, the first PEFT method specifically designed for RS artifact mitigation. Earth-Adapter introduces a novel Frequency-Guided Mixture of Adapters (MoA) approach, structured around a ''divide and conquer" strategy. It first utilizes Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT) to "divide" features into distinct frequency components, thereby effectively isolating artifact-related information from semantic signals. Subsequently, to ''conquer" these artifact, MoA independently optimizes features within different subspaces and dynamically assigns weights via a router to aggregate the refined representations. This enables adaptive refinement of the VFM’s representation space to mitigate the impact of artifacts. This simple yet highly effective PEFT method demonstrably mitigates artifacts and significantly enhances VFMs performance on RS segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate Earth-Adapter's effectiveness on in-domain semantic segmentation (SS), as well as Domain Adaptive (DA) and Domain Generalized (DG) semantic segmentation tasks. Compared with the baseline Rein, Earth-Adapter significantly improves mIoU by 1.2% in SS, 9.0% in DA, and 3.1% in DG benchmarks. Our code and weights will be released soon.

Due to the substantial domain gaps in Remote Sensing (RS) images that are characterized by variabilities such as location, wavelength, and sensor type, Remote Sensing Domain Generalization (RSDG) has emerged as a critical and valuable research frontier, focusing on developing models that generalize effectively across diverse scenarios. However, research in this area remains underexplored: (1) Current cross-domain methods primarily focus on Domain Adaptation (DA), which adapts models to predefined domains rather than to unseen ones; (2) Few studies target the RSDG issue, especially for semantic segmentation tasks. Existing related models are developed for specific unknown domains, struggling with issues of underfitting on other unseen scenarios; (3) Existing RS foundation models tend to prioritize in-domain performance over cross-domain generalization. To this end, we introduce the first vision foundation model for RSDG semantic segmentation, CrossEarth. CrossEarth demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization through a specially designed data-level Earth-Style Injection pipeline and a model-level Multi-Task Training pipeline. In addition, for the semantic segmentation task, we have curated an RSDG benchmark comprising 32 semantic segmentation scenarios across various regions, spectral bands, platforms, and climates, providing comprehensive evaluations of the generalizability of future RSDG models. Extensive experiments on this collection demonstrate the superiority of CrossEarth over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has revolutionized representation learning in Remote Sensing (RS), advancing Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) to leverage vast unlabeled satellite imagery for diverse downstream tasks. Currently, GFMs primarily employ objectives like contrastive learning or masked image modeling, owing to their proven success in learning transferable representations. However, generative diffusion models, which demonstrate the potential to capture multi-grained semantics essential for RS tasks during image generation, remain underexplored for discriminative applications. This prompts the question: can generative diffusion models also excel and serve as GFMs with sufficient discriminative power? In this work, we answer this question with SatDiFuser, a framework that transforms a diffusion-based generative geospatial foundation model into a powerful pretraining tool for discriminative RS. By systematically analyzing multi-stage, noise-dependent diffusion features, we develop three fusion strategies to effectively leverage these diverse representations. Extensive experiments on remote sensing benchmarks show that SatDiFuser outperforms state-of-the-art GFMs, achieving gains of up to +5.7% mIoU in semantic segmentation and +7.9% F1-score in classification, demonstrating the capacity of diffusion-based generative foundation models to rival or exceed discriminative GFMs. The source code is available at: https://github.com/yurujaja/SatDiFuser.