Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown great promise in natural image domains, allowing users to hold a dialogue about given visual content. However, such general-domain VLMs perform poorly for Remote Sensing (RS) scenarios, leading to inaccurate or fabricated information when presented with RS domain-specific queries. Such a behavior emerges due to the unique challenges introduced by RS imagery. For example, to handle high-resolution RS imagery with diverse scale changes across categories and many small objects, region-level reasoning is necessary alongside holistic scene interpretation. Furthermore, the lack of domain-specific multimodal instruction following data as well as strong backbone models for RS make it hard for the models to align their behavior with user queries. To address these limitations, we propose GeoChat - the first versatile remote sensing VLM that offers multitask conversational capabilities with high-resolution RS images. Specifically, GeoChat can not only answer image-level queries but also accepts region inputs to hold region-specific dialogue. Furthermore, it can visually ground objects in its responses by referring to their spatial coordinates. To address the lack of domain-specific datasets, we generate a novel RS multimodal instruction-following dataset by extending image-text pairs from existing diverse RS datasets. We establish a comprehensive benchmark for RS multitask conversations and compare with a number of baseline methods. GeoChat demonstrates robust zero-shot performance on various RS tasks, e.g., image and region captioning, visual question answering, scene classification, visually grounded conversations and referring detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/geochat.

GeoChat是第一个多功能的遥感视觉语言模型，它具备高分辨率遥感图像的多任务对话能力，并能将对象视觉上地与其空间坐标相关联，通过扩展现有多样的遥感数据集中的图像-文本对生成了一个新的领域特定的多模态指令跟随数据集，成功解决了现有模型在遥感领域的局限性，并在各个遥感任务上展示了强大的零样本性能。

GeoChat: 用于遥感的基于大规模视觉语言模型的实体化系统