XLRS-Bench: Could Your Multimodal LLMs Understand Extremely Large Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery?

Fengxiang Wang, Hongzhen Wang, Zonghao Guo, Di Wang, Yulin Wang, Mingshuo Chen, Qiang Ma, Long Lan, Wenjing Yang, Jing Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025, pp. 14325-14336

The astonishing breakthrough of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has necessitated new benchmarks to quantitatively assess their capabilities, reveal their limitations, and indicate future research directions. However, this is challenging in the context of remote sensing (RS), since the imagery features ultra-high resolution that incorporates extremely complex semantic relationships. Existing benchmarks usually adopt notably smaller image sizes than real-world RS scenarios, suffer from limited annotation quality, and consider insufficient dimensions of evaluation. To address these issues, we present XLRS-Bench: a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the perception and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs in ultra-high-resolution RS scenarios. XLRS-Bench boasts the largest average image size (8500x8500) observed thus far, with all evaluation samples meticulously annotated manually, assisted by a novel semi-automatic captioner on ultra-high-resolution RS images. On top of the XLRS-Bench, 16 sub-tasks are defined to evaluate MLLMs' 10 kinds of perceptual capabilities and 6 kinds of reasoning capabilities, with a primary emphasis on advanced cognitive processes that facilitate real-world decision-making and the capture of spatiotemporal changes. The results of both general and RS-focused MLLMs on XLRS-Bench indicate that further efforts are needed for real-world RS applications. We will open source XLRS-Bench to support further research of developing more powerful MLLMs for RS.