Text Before Vision: Staged Knowledge Injection Matters for Agentic RLVR in Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Understanding

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Authors: Fengxiang Wang, Mingshuo Chen, Yueying Li, Yajie Yang, Yuhao Zhou, Di Wang, Yifan Zhang, Haoyu Wang, Haiyan Zhao, Hongda Sun, Long Lan, Jun Song
+4 more Yulin Wang, Jing A. Zhang, Wenlong Zhang, Bo Du
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Multimodal reasoning for ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing (RS) is usually bottlenecked by visual evidence acquisition: the model necessitates localizing tiny task-relevant regions in massive pixel spaces. While Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) using zoom-in tools offers a path forward, we find that standard reinforcement learning struggles to navigate these vast visual spaces without structured domain priors. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between post-training paradigms: comparing Cold-start Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), RLVR, and Agentic RLVR on the UHR RS benchmark.Our controlled studies yield a counter-intuitive finding: high-quality Earth-science text-only QA is a primary driver of UHR visual reasoning gains. Despite lacking images, domain-specific text injects the concepts, mechanistic explanations, and decision rules necessary to guide visual evidence retrieval.Based on this, we propose a staged knowledge injection recipe: (1) cold-starting with scalable, knowledge-graph-verified Earth-science text QA to instill reasoning structures;and (2) "pre-warming" on the same hard UHR image-text examples during SFT to stabilize and amplify subsequent tool-based RL. This approach achieves a 60.40% Pass@1 on XLRS-Bench, significantly outperforming larger general purpose models (e.g., GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.0 Pro, Intern-S1) and establishing a new state-of-the-art.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Multimodal Machine Learning Applications Remote-Sensing Image Classification Advanced Neural Network Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
15 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint