RemoteZero: Geospatial Reasoning with Zero Labels

Abstract

Geospatial reasoning requires models to identify image regions that satisfy complex and often implicit user intents. Recent reinforcement learning approaches improve reasoning without manually annotated reasoning traces, but still require human-provided target labels to construct rewards, limiting their use on large-scale unlabeled Earth observation data. We introduce RemoteZero, a label-free framework for reinforcement-based geospatial reasoning. Our key observation is twofold: MLLMs are often more reliable at evaluating candidates than generating solutions, while aerial imagery reduces interference in region-level verification. Therefore, RemoteZero converts each predicted region into a visual crop and uses its semantic consistency with the query as an intrinsic reward for GRPO optimization. This formulation removes the need for human-provided solution labels and further supports iterative self-evolution by reusing previous-round models as verifiers. Experiments show that RemoteZero outperforms strong supervised baselines, applies effectively to other Earth observation tasks, and continues to improve through self-evolution as the training data expand. We hope this direction can broadly benefit the Earth observation community.