LithoBench: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Remote-Sensing Lithology Interpretation

TL;DR

LithoBench is a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate large multimodal models' ability to interpret remote sensing lithology, incorporating expert annotations and multi-level geological understanding.

Contribution

The paper introduces LithoBench, a new multi-level benchmark with expert-annotated data and a semi-automated construction pipeline for assessing geological semantic understanding in models.

Findings

Large vision-language models show significant limitations in geological understanding.

Higher-order reasoning tasks remain challenging for current models.

LithoBench provides a structured evaluation across five cognitive levels.

Abstract

Remote sensing lithology interpretation is fundamental to geological surveys, mineral exploration, and regional geological mapping. Unlike general land-cover recognition, lithology interpretation is a knowledge-intensive task that requires experts to infer rock types from various features, e.g., subtle visual, spectral, textural, geomorphological, and contextual cues, making reliable automated interpretation highly challenging. Geological knowledge-guided large multimodal models offer new opportunities, yet their evaluation remains constrained by the lack of benchmarks that capture lithological annotations, multi-level geological semantics, and expert-informed assessment. Here, we propose LithoBench, a multi-level benchmark for evaluating geological semantic understanding in remote sensing lithology interpretation. LithoBench contains 10,000 expert-annotated interpretation instances across 12 representative lithological categories, including 4,000 multiple-choice and 6,000 open-ended tasks organized into five cognitive levels: Identification and Description, Comparative Analysis, Mechanism Explanation, Practical Application, and Comprehensive Reasoning. We further develop an expert-in-the-loop, knowledge-grounded semi-automated construction pipeline, coupling multi sub-processes, e.g., structured geological image descriptions, to enhance geological validity and evaluation reliability. Experiments with multiple large vision-language models eveal substantial limitations in geological semantic understanding, particularly on higher-order explanation, application, and reasoning tasks.