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arxiv: 2605.10576 · v1 · submitted 2026-05-11 · 💻 cs.CV · cs.AI

Recognition: no theorem link

SenseBench: A Benchmark for Remote Sensing Low-Level Visual Perception and Description in Large Vision-Language Models

Chen Zhong, Guangyi Yang, Jiaxing Sun, Wei He, Xiao An, Zihan Gui

Authors on Pith no claims yet

Pith reviewed 2026-05-12 03:55 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CV cs.AI
keywords remote sensingvision-language modelsimage quality assessmentlow-level perceptionbenchmarkdegradationsVLMsdomain bias
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The pith

SenseBench shows that vision-language models carry strong biases toward everyday photos and fail to reliably perceive or describe degradations in remote sensing images.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper introduces SenseBench, a benchmark built from a physics-based taxonomy of remote sensing degradations, to test whether large vision-language models can move beyond their training on ground-level photos and handle the specific artifacts that appear in satellite and aerial imagery. Over 10,000 curated examples span six major and twenty-two fine-grained degradation types, with two evaluation tracks: objective tasks that measure whether models can detect and localize low-level issues, and subjective tasks that ask for diagnostic language descriptions. Tests on twenty-nine current VLMs uncover consistent patterns of domain skew, collapse when multiple distortions are present, fluent-sounding but inaccurate descriptions, and an inversion in which perception accuracy and description quality trade off against each other. These findings matter because remote-sensing analysts need interpretable, language-based quality judgments rather than single numeric scores, and the benchmark supplies both the data and the protocols to measure progress toward that goal.

Core claim

Comprehensive evaluation of 29 state-of-the-art VLMs on SenseBench reveals that these models exhibit skewed domain priors favoring natural ground-level images, multi-distortion collapse, fluency illusion in generated descriptions, and a perception-description inversion effect when applied to remote sensing degradations.

What carries the argument

SenseBench, the benchmark consisting of a physics-based hierarchical taxonomy that unifies non-reference and reference-based image-quality paradigms together with more than 10,000 curated instances across 6 major and 22 fine-grained remote-sensing degradation categories and two complementary protocols for objective perception and subjective diagnostic description.

If this is right

  • VLMs will need explicit domain adaptation or remote-sensing-specific pretraining before they can serve as reliable interpreters of image quality in satellite or aerial data.
  • Language-based diagnostic descriptions from VLMs could replace or augment scalar IQA scores only after the observed fluency illusion and inversion effects are mitigated.
  • Multi-distortion scenarios common in real remote-sensing pipelines will continue to expose weaknesses in current models until the benchmark data are used for targeted training.
  • The two-protocol design (objective perception plus subjective description) provides a template for future benchmarks that want to separate detection accuracy from explanatory fluency.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The same taxonomy-driven construction method could be applied to create parallel benchmarks for medical, underwater, or astronomical imagery where VLMs also encounter domain gaps.
  • Fine-tuning VLMs on the SenseBench training split might reduce the reported inversion effect and improve both perception and description scores simultaneously.
  • If the inversion effect persists across domains, it would suggest a fundamental architectural tension in current VLMs between low-level feature extraction and high-level language generation.

Load-bearing premise

The physics-based hierarchical taxonomy and the 10K curated instances accurately and representatively capture real-world remote sensing degradations without selection bias or annotation errors.

What would settle it

Re-running the same 29 VLMs on an independently assembled collection of remote-sensing images that matches the degradation taxonomy but uses different sensors and scenes, and finding no statistically significant domain skew, multi-distortion collapse, fluency illusion, or perception-description inversion.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.10576 by Chen Zhong, Guangyi Yang, Jiaxing Sun, Wei He, Xiao An, Zihan Gui.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Overview of the dataset coverage and degradation taxonomy. The left panel shows the global [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p003_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Overview of the SenseBench evaluation framework. The upper part shows the [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p004_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Overview of SenseBench construction. Remote sensing images are sourced globally from [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p005_3.png] view at source ↗
Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: To structurally prevent inference-time leakage, high-quality references are strictly withheld [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p006_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Cross-perspective analysis of VLMs on SenseBench. Circles, squares, and triangles denote [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p008_4.png] view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Examples of L-2 distortions within the L-1 dimension of Image Noise. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p016_5.png] view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Examples of L-2 distortions within the L-1 dimension of Image Blur [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p017_6.png] view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Examples of L-2 distortions within the L-1 dimension of Image Cloud. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p017_7.png] view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Examples of L-2 distortions within the L-1 dimension of Image Compression. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p018_8.png] view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Examples of L-2 distortions within the L-1 dimension of Image Correction. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p018_9.png] view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: Examples of L-2 distortions within the L-1 dimension of Image Missing. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p019_10.png] view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Details of the construction of SensePerception. from Google Earth6 . All collected image patches were finally cropped or resized to a unified spatial size of 512 × 512 for subsequent distortion synthesis and benchmark construction. This process yielded 26,493 RS image patches, which formed the initial source image pool for the subsequent filtering and benchmark construction pipeline. B.2 Data Filtering an… view at source ↗
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: Details of the construction of SenseDescription. were generated with predefined parameter settings so that the corresponding distortion category and severity level could be explicitly recorded. Each distorted image was paired with an information file, which contains the Image Address, L1_distortion, L2_distortion, and Severity Level. These image–metadata pairs were then used as the basic data units for co… view at source ↗
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: SenseBench Annotation System used for human evaluator baseline collection and evalua [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p027_13.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Low-level visual perception underpins reliable remote sensing (RS) image analysis, yet current image quality assessment (IQA) methods output uninterpretable scalar scores rather than characterizing physics-driven RS degradations, deviating markedly from the diagnostic needs of RS experts. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) present a compelling alternative by delivering language-grounded IQA, their visual priors are heavily biased toward ground-level natural images. Consequently, whether VLMs can overcome this domain gap to perceive and articulate RS artifacts remains insufficiently studied. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{SenseBench}, the first dedicated diagnostic benchmark for RS low-level visual perception and description. Driven by a physics-based hierarchical taxonomy that unifies both non-reference and reference-based paradigms, SenseBench features over 10K meticulously curated instances across 6 major and 22 fine-grained RS degradation categories. Specifically, two complementary protocols are designed for evaluation: objective low-level visual \textit{perception} and subjective diagnostic \textit{description}. Comprehensive evaluation of 29 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals not only skewed domain priors and multi-distortion collapse, but also \textit{fluency illusion} and a \textit{perception-description inversion} effect. We hope SenseBench provides a robust evaluation testbed and high-quality diagnostic data to advance the development of VLMs in RS low-level perception. Code and datasets are available \href{https://github.com/Zhong-Chenchen/SenseBench}{\textcolor{blue}{here}}.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 0 minor

Summary. The manuscript introduces SenseBench, the first dedicated benchmark for remote sensing low-level visual perception and description in VLMs. It is driven by a physics-based hierarchical taxonomy unifying non-reference and reference-based paradigms, featuring over 10K curated instances across 6 major and 22 fine-grained RS degradation categories. Two complementary protocols evaluate objective low-level visual perception and subjective diagnostic description. Comprehensive evaluation of 29 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals skewed domain priors, multi-distortion collapse, fluency illusion, and a perception-description inversion effect. Code and datasets are released publicly.

Significance. If the benchmark validity holds, this work would be significant for addressing the domain gap in VLMs for remote sensing applications, where standard IQA methods fall short of expert diagnostic needs. It supplies a reproducible testbed and high-quality data to diagnose specific VLM failure modes. The public release of code and datasets on GitHub is a clear strength that supports reproducibility and further research in the field.

major comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: The central claims rest on evaluation outcomes for 29 VLMs showing domain priors, multi-distortion collapse, fluency illusion, and perception-description inversion, yet the abstract supplies no information on curation methodology, inter-annotator agreement, statistical tests, or controls for these effects; this leaves the results dependent on unverified assertions about the 10K instances.
  2. [Benchmark construction] Benchmark construction: The physics-based hierarchical taxonomy and 10K instances are presented as accurately capturing real-world RS degradations across categories, but no quantitative evidence (e.g., inter-annotator agreement, comparison to real satellite sensor logs, or external validation) is provided to rule out selection bias or annotation artifacts that could produce benchmark-specific rather than general effects.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the referee's report. We address the major comments point by point, agreeing to make revisions to improve the clarity and validation of our benchmark.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: The central claims rest on evaluation outcomes for 29 VLMs showing domain priors, multi-distortion collapse, fluency illusion, and perception-description inversion, yet the abstract supplies no information on curation methodology, inter-annotator agreement, statistical tests, or controls for these effects; this leaves the results dependent on unverified assertions about the 10K instances.

    Authors: The abstract is intentionally concise to highlight the key contributions and findings. Detailed information on the curation methodology, including the physics-based taxonomy, instance selection criteria, inter-annotator agreement for the diagnostic descriptions, and statistical tests used in the VLM evaluations, is provided in the Methods and Experiments sections of the manuscript. We will revise the abstract to include a short statement on the curation process and validation to make the claims more self-contained. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Benchmark construction] Benchmark construction: The physics-based hierarchical taxonomy and 10K instances are presented as accurately capturing real-world RS degradations across categories, but no quantitative evidence (e.g., inter-annotator agreement, comparison to real satellite sensor logs, or external validation) is provided to rule out selection bias or annotation artifacts that could produce benchmark-specific rather than general effects.

    Authors: We thank the referee for this observation. The taxonomy is constructed based on physical models of RS image formation and degradation processes documented in the remote sensing literature. The 10K instances were curated through a multi-stage process involving expert annotation. To strengthen the manuscript, we will add quantitative evidence including inter-annotator agreement metrics for the annotations and additional external validation steps. Direct comparison to proprietary satellite sensor logs is challenging due to data access restrictions, but we will incorporate comparisons to publicly available RS degradation datasets and expert surveys to mitigate concerns about selection bias. revision: partial

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity; empirical benchmark with direct evaluation

full rationale

The paper constructs SenseBench via a physics-based taxonomy and curation of 10K instances, then reports direct empirical results from evaluating 29 VLMs on perception and description protocols. No equations, fitted parameters, self-referential derivations, or load-bearing self-citations appear in the provided text. Claims about domain priors, collapse, fluency illusion, and inversion effects are observations from the evaluation rather than reductions to inputs by construction, rendering the chain self-contained.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The central contribution rests on a newly introduced physics-based hierarchical taxonomy and a large curated dataset; no free parameters are fitted, no new physical entities are postulated, and the only background assumption is that the taxonomy faithfully reflects RS degradation physics.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption A physics-based hierarchical taxonomy unifies non-reference and reference-based RS degradation paradigms
    Invoked to organize the 6 major and 22 fine-grained categories; assumed to be accurate without further validation details in the abstract.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5587 in / 1290 out tokens · 102409 ms · 2026-05-12T03:55:56.467447+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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Reference graph

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71 extracted references · 71 canonical work pages · 8 internal anchors

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