Towards Label-Efficient Geospatial Foundation Model Adaptation via Positive-Unlabeled Learning for Building Damage Mapping
Hengwei Zhao, Qirui Wang, Zhuo Zheng, Xiaoyan Lu, Rusty Feagin, Wenzhe Jiao
原文摘要
Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) are reshaping remote sensing by shifting the field from task-specific modeling toward general-purpose geospatial intelligence. Mapping the damage to buildings stands to benefit substantially from this shift, as GFMs pretrained on large-scale Earth observation data provide generalizable geospatial representations that can facilitate effective responses to sudden-onset disasters. Although parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) facilitates GFM adaptation, parameter efficiency does not necessarily translate into label efficiency. Building damage mapping remains challenging due to scarce pre-existing labeled data or limited time for annotation. When weak supervision is introduced to alleviate the labeling bottleneck, we identify the difficulty of learning sufficiently discriminative representations as a key challenge for label-efficient GFM adaptation. To address this challenge, we propose a Positive-Unlabeled GFM Adaptation (PUMA) framework that requires annotations for only a small number of damaged buildings. More specifically, PUMA integrates non-contrastive weakly supervised representation refinement to mitigate the impact of noisy supervision on representation learning from a gradient perspective, and latent-state-based label disambiguation to enable reversible supervision refinement without requiring class prior estimation. Extensive experiments on disaster benchmark datasets from around the world demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of PUMA. A real-world application to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires further highlighted its potential to accurately map damage under highly limited supervision. More broadly, these findings suggest that weakly supervised PEFT offers a label-efficient pathway from GFMs to real-world applications.
cs.CV · cs.AI