Multimodal-Multiresolution Foundation Model for Lunar Remote Sensing

On multimodal ice prospectivity regression, pretrained variants achieve the best results, while the random-init model outperforms most baselines, suggesting gains arise from both the architecture and pretraining. It comes from a paper posted to arXiv on 16 September 2026. We present a multimodal foundation model for lunar remote sensing, pretrained from scratch on SomBench, a geographically partitioned corpus of nearly two million co-registered tile bundles spanning 11 modalities at two spatial scales (1 m/pixel and 100 m/pixel). The model adapts the TerraMind masked-token architecture with two lunar-specific extensions: acquisition geometry is provided as explicit context, and meter- and hundred-meter-scale tiles are trained jointly so that a single set of weights covers both resolutions. FlexiViT patch embeddings allow adaptation to different patch sizes without retraining, while modality-wise inputs enable flexible multimodal fine-tuning. Qualitative generation experiments suggest the model learns meaningful cross-modal correspondences, including terrain derivatives from elevation and illumination-consistent reflectance from geometry. We evaluate on four benchmarks: crater detection at WAC and NAC scales, irregular mare patch (IMP) segmentation, and polar ice prospectivity regression. Across tasks, the pretrained model matches or outperforms ImageNet-pretrained baselines and an architecturally identical random-init control. Label efficiency is notable for WAC crater detection, where the pretrained model trained on 50% of the data exceeds the strongest ImageNet baseline trained on the full dataset. Among adaptation strategies, LoRA matches or surpasses full fine-tuning on crater detection and IMP segmentation while using far fewer trainable parameters, whereas full fine-tuning performs best for ice prospectivity regression. We release the pretrained checkpoint, benchmark datasets, and fine-tuning code to support reproducible lunar AI research.

Why it counts

On multimodal ice prospectivity regression, pretrained variants achieve the best results, while the random-init model outperforms most baselines, suggesting gains arise from both the architecture and pretraining. Across tasks, the pretrained model matches or outperforms ImageNet-pretrained baselines and an architecturally identical random-init control.

Sources

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What is not known

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