Building geospatial foundation models via continual pretraining

New approach enables sustainable machine learning for remote-sensing applications.

Geospatial technologies have rapidly ascended to a position of paramount importance across the globe. By providing a better understanding of Earth's ever-evolving landscape and our intricate interactions with the environment, these technologies help us navigate complex global challenges. As the volume of geospatial data increases, researchers are exploring ways to bring the full power of deep learning to bear on its analysis.

In the area of artificial intelligence (AI), foundation models have emerged as a transformative technology, offering unparalleled performance in domains such as computer vision and natural-language processing. However, when existing image-embedding models are adapted to the geospatial domain, they tend to fall short because of the inherent differences between natural images and remote sensing data. On the other hand, training geospatial-specific models from the ground up is resource intensive, time consuming, and environmentally costly.

In our recent work “Towards geospatial foundation models via continual pretraining”, published at the 2023 International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), we show how to craft more-powerful geospatial foundation models while keeping resource demands in check. Rather than following the usual playbook, we explore the potential of continual pretraining, which involves further refining existing foundation models for specific domains through a secondary pretraining phase. A refined model can then be fine-tuned for various downstream tasks within its domain.

In tests, we compared our approach to six baselines on seven downstream datasets covering tasks such as change detection, classification, multilabel classification, semantic segmentation, and super-resolution. Across all seven tasks, our approach significantly outperformed the baselines.

A diagram representing the performances of several models on five different datasets as the areas of pentagons. The new model is represented as a regular pentagon; the four baseline models are represented as irregular pentagons within the area of the regular pentagon.
The results of our experiments across all seven datasets.

Our approach has the potential to enhance performance by using large-scale ImageNet representations as a foundation upon which robust geospatial models can be constructed. The computer vision community continuously improves natural-image models, offering a consistent source of better-performing baseline models. Our approach opens the door for geospatial models to harness these advances with minimal resource consumption, ultimately leading to sustainable benefits for the geospatial community.

GeoPile

Building an effective foundation model begins with data selection. A common choice for pretraining geospatial models is data from the Sentinel-2 satellite. However, simply having a large corpus of such imagery isn't enough.

To pretrain our geospatial model, we use the type of self-supervision that’s become standard for foundation models: in a process known as masked image modeling (MIM), we mask out elements of the input images, and the model learns to fill them in. But in this context, the lack of complexity and variability in the Sentinel-2 data can make the reconstruction task too straightforward.

To address this challenge, we combined data from five open-source datasets — with both labeled and unlabeled images — to produce a diverse set of geospatial pretraining data, which we call GeoPile. For textural detail, we ensure a variety of ground sample distances (GSDs), including images with much higher resolution than those captured by Sentinel-2 (which has a GSD of 10 meters). Furthermore, the labeled datasets encompass a wide variety of image classes from general remote sensing scenes, ensuring visual diversity across samples.

Parallel grids, each containing four satellite images. The four at left have lower feature resolution and more homogenous coloring; the four at right are more detailed.
Sample images from a Sentinel-2 pretraining dataset (left) and GeoPile (right). Sentinel-2 has noticeably lower feature diversity within images and across images than GeoPile does.

Continual pretraining for geospatial foundation models

Much previous research on geospatial foundation models (GFMs) has disregarded existing natural-image models. We, on the other hand, reason that leveraging the knowledge encoded in those models should produce strong performance with minimal overhead. To this end, we propose an unsupervised, multi-objective training paradigm for effective and efficient pretraining of geospatial models.

Our GFM continual-pretraining paradigm is a teacher-student approach that uses two parallel model branches. The teacher (FT) is equipped with the weighty knowledge of ImageNet-22k initialization and serves as a guiding force during training. The student (FS) starts from a blank slate and evolves into the final geospatial foundation model.

A model architecture diagram showing two processing branches extending from the GeoPile repository, one branch a teacher model and the other a student model. A divided rectangle, representing an intermediary state of the student model, passes through a module marked "P" for projector, and is projected into the representational space of the teacher model.
The design of our GFM continual-pretraining paradigm. FT and FS are the teacher and student networks. P and D are simple multilayer perceptrons that serve as a projector (projecting input data into a representational space) and decoder, respectively. Lfeat is a cosine similarity loss on the intermediate features computed by both models, and LMIM is an L1 loss on the reconstructed pixels.

This paradigm enables an ideal two-fold optimization. Distillation from the intermediate features of the teacher ensures that the student can benefit from the teacher’s diverse knowledge, learning more in less time. At the same time, the student is given freedom to adapt to in-domain data through its own MIM pretraining objective, gathering new features to improve performance.

Research areas

Related content

US, WA, Seattle
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video team member, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in the Content Understanding Team, you will lead the end-to-end research and deployment of video and multi-modal models applied to a variety of downstream applications. More specifically, you will: - Work backwards from customer problems to research and design scientific approaches for solving them - Work closely with other scientists, engineers and product managers to expand the depth of our product insights with data, create a variety of experiments to determine the high impact projects to include in planning roadmaps - Stay up-to-date with advancements and the latest modeling techniques in the field - Publish your research findings in top conferences and journals About the team Our Prime Video Content Understanding team builds holistic media representations (e.g. descriptions of scenes, semantic embeddings) and apply them to new customer experiences supply chain problems. Our technology spans the entire Prime Video catalogue globally, and we enable instant recaps, skip intro timing, ad placement, search, and content moderation.
US, WA, Seattle
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video team member, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in the Content Understanding Team, you will lead the end-to-end research and deployment of video and multi-modal models applied to a variety of downstream applications. More specifically, you will: - Work backwards from customer problems to research and design scientific approaches for solving them - Work closely with other scientists, engineers and product managers to expand the depth of our product insights with data, create a variety of experiments to determine the high impact projects to include in planning roadmaps - Stay up-to-date with advancements and the latest modeling techniques in the field - Publish your research findings in top conferences and journals About the team Our Prime Video Content Understanding team builds holistic media representations (e.g. descriptions of scenes, semantic embeddings) and apply them to new customer experiences supply chain problems. Our technology spans the entire Prime Video catalogue globally, and we enable instant recaps, skip intro timing, ad placement, search, and content moderation.
IN, HR, Gurugram
Our customers have immense faith in our ability to deliver packages timely and as expected. A well planned network seamlessly scales to handle millions of package movements a day. It has monitoring mechanisms that detect failures before they even happen (such as predicting network congestion, operations breakdown), and perform proactive corrective actions. When failures do happen, it has inbuilt redundancies to mitigate impact (such as determine other routes or service providers that can handle the extra load), and avoids relying on single points of failure (service provider, node, or arc). Finally, it is cost optimal, so that customers can be passed the benefit from an efficiently set up network. Amazon Shipping is hiring Applied Scientists to help improve our ability to plan and execute package movements. As an Applied Scientist in Amazon Shipping, you will work on multiple challenging machine learning problems spread across a wide spectrum of business problems. You will build ML models to help our transportation cost auditing platforms effectively audit off-manifest (discrepancies between planned and actual shipping cost). You will build models to improve the quality of financial and planning data by accurately predicting ship cost at a package level. Your models will help forecast the packages required to be pick from shipper warehouses to reduce First Mile shipping cost. Using signals from within the transportation network (such as network load, and velocity of movements derived from package scan events) and outside (such as weather signals), you will build models that predict delivery delay for every package. These models will help improve buyer experience by triggering early corrective actions, and generating proactive customer notifications. Your role will require you to demonstrate Think Big and Invent and Simplify, by refining and translating Transportation domain-related business problems into one or more Machine Learning problems. You will use techniques from a wide array of machine learning paradigms, such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning. Your model choices will include, but not be limited to, linear/logistic models, tree based models, deep learning models, ensemble models, and Q-learning models. You will use techniques such as LIME and SHAP to make your models interpretable for your customers. You will employ a family of reusable modelling solutions to ensure that your ML solution scales across multiple regions (such as North America, Europe, Asia) and package movement types (such as small parcel movements and truck movements). You will partner with Applied Scientists and Research Scientists from other teams in US and India working on related business domains. Your models are expected to be of production quality, and will be directly used in production services. You will work as part of a diverse data science and engineering team comprising of other Applied Scientists, Software Development Engineers and Business Intelligence Engineers. You will participate in the Amazon ML community by authoring scientific papers and submitting them to Machine Learning conferences. You will mentor Applied Scientists and Software Development Engineers having a strong interest in ML. You will also be called upon to provide ML consultation outside your team for other problem statements. If you are excited by this charter, come join us!
IN, HR, Gurugram
We're on a journey to build something new a green field project! Come join our team and build new discovery and shopping products that connect customers with their vehicle of choice. We're looking for a talented Senior Applied Scientist to join our team of product managers, designers, and engineers to design, and build innovative automotive-shopping experiences for our customers. This is a great opportunity for an experienced engineer to design and implement the technology for a new Amazon business. We are looking for a Applied Scientist to design, implement and deliver end-to-end solutions. We are seeking passionate, hands-on, experienced and seasoned Senior Applied Scientist who will be deep in code and algorithms; who are technically strong in building scalable computer vision machine learning systems across item understanding, pose estimation, class imbalanced classifiers, identification and segmentation.. You will drive ideas to products using paradigms such as deep learning, semi supervised learning and dynamic learning. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will also help lead and mentor our team of applied scientists and engineers. You will take on complex customer problems, distill customer requirements, and then deliver solutions that either leverage existing academic and industrial research or utilize your own out-of-the-box but pragmatic thinking. In addition to coming up with novel solutions and prototypes, you will directly contribute to implementation while you lead. A successful candidate has excellent technical depth, scientific vision, project management skills, great communication skills, and a drive to achieve results in a unified team environment. You should enjoy the process of solving real-world problems that, quite frankly, haven’t been solved at scale anywhere before. Along the way, we guarantee you’ll get opportunities to be a bold disruptor, prolific innovator, and a reputed problem solver—someone who truly enables AI and robotics to significantly impact the lives of millions of consumers. Key job responsibilities Architect, design, and implement Machine Learning models for vision systems on robotic platforms Optimize, deploy, and support at scale ML models on the edge. Influence the team's strategy and contribute to long-term vision and roadmap. Work with stakeholders across , science, and operations teams to iterate on design and implementation. Maintain high standards by participating in reviews, designing for fault tolerance and operational excellence, and creating mechanisms for continuous improvement. Prototype and test concepts or features, both through simulation and emulators and with live robotic equipment Work directly with customers and partners to test prototypes and incorporate feedback Mentor other engineer team members. A day in the life - 6+ years of building machine learning models for retail application experience - PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience - Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language - Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning - Demonstrated expertise in computer vision and machine learning techniques.
US, WA, Seattle
Do you want to re-invent how millions of people consume video content on their TVs, Tablets and Alexa? We are building a free to watch streaming service called Fire TV Channels (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/21/amazon-launches-fire-tv-channels-app-400-fast-channels/). Our goal is to provide customers with a delightful and personalized experience for consuming content across News, Sports, Cooking, Gaming, Entertainment, Lifestyle and more. You will work closely with engineering and product stakeholders to realize our ambitious product vision. You will get to work with Generative AI and other state of the art technologies to help build personalization and recommendation solutions from the ground up. You will be in the driver's seat to present customers with content they will love. Using Amazon’s large-scale computing resources, you will ask research questions about customer behavior, build state-of-the-art models to generate recommendations and run these models to enhance the customer experience. You will participate in the Amazon ML community and mentor Applied Scientists and Software Engineers with a strong interest in and knowledge of ML. Your work will directly benefit customers and you will measure the impact using scientific tools.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-modal systems. You will support projects that work on technologies including multi-modal model alignment, moderation systems and evaluation. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will support the development of novel algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). You are also expected to publish in top tier conferences. About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems. Specifically, we focus on model alignment with an aim to maintain safety while not denting utility, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to lead the development of novel algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
IN, KA, Bangalore
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video technologist, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities As a highly experienced and seasoned science leader, you will apply state of the art natural language processing and computer vision research to video centric digital media, while also responsible for creating and maintaining the best environment for applied science in order to recruit, retain and develop top talent. You will lead the research direction for a team of deeply talented applied scientists, creating the roadmaps for forward-looking research and communicate them effectively to senior leadership. You will also hire and develop applied scientists - growing the team to meet the evolving needs of our customers.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Amazon Alexa AI team in India is seeking a talented, self-driven Applied Scientist to work on prototyping, optimizing, and deploying ML algorithms within the realm of Generative AI. Key responsibilities include: - Research, experiment and build Proof Of Concepts advancing the state of the art in AI & ML for GenAI. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to architect and execute technically rigorous AI projects. - Thrive in dynamic environments, adapting quickly to evolving technical requirements and deadlines. - Engage in effective technical communication (written & spoken) with coordination across teams. - Conduct thorough documentation of algorithms, methodologies, and findings for transparency and reproducibility. - Publish research papers in internal and external venues of repute - Support on-call activities for critical issues Basic Qualifications: - Master’s or PhD in computer science, statistics or a related field or relevant science experience (publications/scientific prototypes) in lieu of Masters - Experience in deep learning, machine learning, and data science. - Proficiency in coding and software development, with a strong focus on machine learning frameworks. - Experience in Python, or another language; command line usage; familiarity with Linux and AWS ecosystems. - Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets, etc. - Excellent communication skills (written & spoken) and ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed, cross-functional team setting. Preferred Qualifications: - Track record of diving into data to discover hidden patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis - Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations - The motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. - Exceptional level of organization and strong attention to detail - Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment - Papers published in AI/ML venues of repute
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Amazon Alexa AI team in India is seeking a talented, self-driven Applied Scientist to work on prototyping, optimizing, and deploying ML algorithms within the realm of Generative AI. Key responsibilities include: - Research, experiment and build Proof Of Concepts advancing the state of the art in AI & ML for GenAI. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to architect and execute technically rigorous AI projects. - Thrive in dynamic environments, adapting quickly to evolving technical requirements and deadlines. - Engage in effective technical communication (written & spoken) with coordination across teams. - Conduct thorough documentation of algorithms, methodologies, and findings for transparency and reproducibility. - Publish research papers in internal and external venues of repute - Support on-call activities for critical issues Basic Qualifications: - Master’s or PhD in computer science, statistics or a related field - 2-7 years experience in deep learning, machine learning, and data science. - Proficiency in coding and software development, with a strong focus on machine learning frameworks. - Experience in Python, or another language; command line usage; familiarity with Linux and AWS ecosystems. - Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets, etc. - Excellent communication skills (written & spoken) and ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed, cross-functional team setting. - Papers published in AI/ML venues of repute Preferred Qualifications: - Track record of diving into data to discover hidden patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis - Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations - The motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. - Exceptional level of organization and strong attention to detail - Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment