RS-Agent: Automating Remote Sensing Tasks through Intelligent Agent
About
Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise for remote sensing tasks such as visual question answering and scene understanding. However, existing models remain limited to basic instruction-following and struggle with real-world scenarios that require multi-source data integration, fine-grained spatial reasoning, and domain expertise. To address this gap, we propose RS-Agent, a domain-adapted intelligent agent that connects user intent with professional remote sensing workflows through structured task planning and tool orchestration. RS-Agent consists of four components aligned with typical remote sensing workflows: a Central Controller for intent understanding and process planning, a dynamic toolkit for tool execution, a Solution Space for task-specific expert guidance, and a Knowledge Space for domain knowledge support. We further introduce Task-Aware Retrieval, which improves planning by identifying task types and retrieving expert-defined solutions, and DualRAG, a weighted dual-path retrieval-augmented generation method that enhances the relevance and completeness of retrieved knowledge. RS-Agent natively supports multiple imaging modalities, including optical and SAR imagery, and can automatically organize dedicated SAR processing tools into executable workflows. Experiments on 9 datasets and 18 remote sensing tasks show that RS-Agent significantly outperforms state-of-the-art MLLMs, achieving over 95% task planning accuracy and strong results in scene classification, object counting, and remote sensing visual question answering. These results demonstrate the value of combining LLM reasoning with remote sensing expertise for intelligent geospatial analysis.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scene Classification | AID | Top-1 Acc96.88 | 75 | |
| Scene Classification | UCMerced | Accuracy98.63 | 26 | |
| Visual Question Answering | RSVQA-LR (test) | R/U Score97 | 18 | |
| Retrieval-Augmented Generation | RSaircraft | Comprehensiveness63.2 | 6 | |
| Task Planning | RS Task Planning Dataset | Object Counting Accuracy100 | 6 | |
| Object Counting | DOTA v1 (test) | Absolute Accuracy33.3 | 3 | |
| Scene Classification | RSSDIVCS | Accuracy98 | 3 |