OlmoEarth: Stable Latent Image Modeling for Multimodal Earth Observation

TL;DR

OlmoEarth is a novel multimodal, spatio-temporal foundation model for Earth observation data, employing a unique self-supervised learning approach that outperforms existing models on various benchmarks and real-world tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a new self-supervised learning formulation, masking strategy, and loss tailored for Earth observation data, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Findings

Outperforms 12 other foundation models on research benchmarks

Achieves best performance on 15 out of 24 embedding evaluation tasks

Leads in 19 out of 29 tasks after full fine-tuning

Abstract

Earth observation data presents a unique challenge: it is spatial like images, sequential like video or text, and highly multimodal. We present OlmoEarth: a multimodal, spatio-temporal foundation model that employs a novel self-supervised learning formulation, masking strategy, and loss all designed for the Earth observation domain. OlmoEarth achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to 12 other foundation models across a variety of research benchmarks and real-world tasks from external partners. When evaluating embeddings OlmoEarth achieves the best performance on 15 out of 24 tasks, and with full fine-tuning it is the best on 19 of 29 tasks. We deploy OlmoEarth as the backbone of an end-to-end platform for data collection, labeling, training, and inference of Earth observation models. The OlmoEarth Platform puts frontier foundation models and powerful data management tools into the hands of non-profits and NGOs working to solve the world's biggest problems. OlmoEarth source code, training data, and pre-trained weights are available at $\href{https://github.com/allenai/olmoearth_pretrain}{\text{https://github.com/allenai/olmoearth_pretrain}}$.