Asking like Socrates: Socrates helps VLMs understand remote sensing images

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22396v1
• Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2025 12:19:37 GMT
• Title: Asking like Socrates: Socrates helps VLMs understand remote sensing images
• Abstract summary: We propose RS-EoT (Remote Sensing Evidence-of-Thought), a language-driven, iterative visual evidence-seeking paradigm.<n>SocraticAgent is a self-play multi-agent system that synthesizes reasoning traces via alternating cycles of reasoning and visual inspection.<n>Experiments show RS-EoT achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple RS VQA and grounding benchmarks.
• Score: 21.00494676428488
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent multimodal reasoning models, inspired by DeepSeek-R1, have significantly advanced vision-language systems. However, in remote sensing (RS) tasks, we observe widespread pseudo reasoning: models narrate the process of reasoning rather than genuinely reason toward the correct answer based on visual evidence. We attribute this to the Glance Effect, where a single, coarse perception of large-scale RS imagery results in incomplete understanding and reasoning based on linguistic self-consistency instead of visual evidence. To address this, we propose RS-EoT (Remote Sensing Evidence-of-Thought), a language-driven, iterative visual evidence-seeking paradigm. To instill this paradigm, we propose SocraticAgent, a self-play multi-agent system that synthesizes reasoning traces via alternating cycles of reasoning and visual inspection. To enhance and generalize these patterns, we propose a two-stage progressive RL strategy: first, RL on fine-grained Grounding tasks to enhance RS-EoT capabilities, followed by RL on RS VQA to generalize to broader understanding scenarios. Experiments show RS-EoT achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple RS VQA and grounding benchmarks. Analyses reveal clear iterative cycles of reasoning and evidence seeking, confirming RS-EoT mitigates the Glance Effect and enables genuine evidence-grounded reasoning. Our code, data, and models are available at https://geox-lab.github.io/Asking_like_Socrates

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