GeoLocSFT: Efficient Visual Geolocation via Supervised Fine-Tuning of Multimodal Foundation Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01277v1
• Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2025 03:16:19 GMT
• Title: GeoLocSFT: Efficient Visual Geolocation via Supervised Fine-Tuning of Multimodal Foundation Models
• Authors: Qiang Yi, Lianlei Shan,
• Abstract summary: GeoLocSFT is trained with only 2700 carefully selected image-GPS pairs from our geographically diverse MR600k dataset.<n>Despite this limited data, our SFT-centric approach substantially improves over baseline models.<n>Our findings highlight the power of high-quality supervision and efficient SFT for planet-scale image geolocation.
• Score: 4.956977275061966
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Accurately determining the geographic location where a single image was taken, visual geolocation, remains a formidable challenge due to the planet's vastness and the deceptive similarity among distant locations. We introduce GeoLocSFT, a framework that demonstrates how targeted supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of a large multimodal foundation model (Gemma 3) using a small, high-quality dataset can yield highly competitive geolocation performance. GeoLocSFT is trained with only 2700 carefully selected image-GPS pairs from our geographically diverse MR600k dataset. Despite this limited data, our SFT-centric approach substantially improves over baseline models and achieves robust results on standard benchmarks such as Im2GPS-3k and YFCC-4k, as well as on our newly proposed and challenging MR40k benchmark, aimed specifically at sparsely populated regions. Further, we explore multi-candidate inference and aggregation strategies but find that the core gains are already realized at the SFT stage. Our findings highlight the power of high-quality supervision and efficient SFT for planet-scale image geolocation, especially when compared to prior methods that require massive databases or complex pipelines. To foster further research, we publicly release the MR40k benchmark dataset.

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