GRASP: Geospatial pixel Reasoning viA Structured Policy learning (2508.17102v1)

Abstract: Geospatial pixel reasoning is a nascent remote-sensing task that aims to generate segmentation masks directly from natural-language instructions. Prevailing MLLM-based systems co-train a LLM and a mask decoder with dense pixel supervision, which is expensive and often weak on out-of-domain (OOD) data. We introduce GRASP, a structured policy-learning framework. In our design, a multimodal LLM first emits task-relevant bounding boxes and positive points from a vision-language instruction. These outputs are then passed to a pre-trained segmentation model, which consumes them as prompts to generate the final mask. Instead of supervised fine-tuning, we optimize the system purely with reinforcement learning: the model is trained solely with GRPO, guided by format rewards and accuracy rewards computed on boxes and points (no mask supervision). This leverages strong priors in foundation models, minimizes trainable parameters, and enables learning from inexpensive annotations. We additionally curate GRASP-1k, which contains reasoning-intensive queries, detailed reasoning traces, and fine-grained segmentation annotations. Evaluations on both in-domain and out-of-domain test sets show state-of-the-art results: about 4% improvement in-domain and up to 54% on OOD benchmarks. The experiment results evidence our model's robust generalization and demonstrate that complex geospatial segmentation behaviors can be learned via RL from weak spatial cues. Code and the dataset will be released open-source.