GEO-Bench: Toward Foundation Models for Earth Monitoring

Abstract

Recent progress in self-supervision shows that pre-training large neural networks on vast amounts of unsupervised data can lead to impressive increases in generalisation for downstream tasks. Such models, recently coined as \emph{foundation models}, have been transformational to the field of natural language processing. While similar models have also been trained on large corpuses of images, they are not well suited for remote sensing data. To stimulate the development of foundation models for Earth monitoring, we propose to develop a new benchmark comprised of a variety of downstream tasks. We believe that this can lead to substantial improvements in many existing applications and facilitate the development of new applications.