GeoChrono: Benchmarking and Rethinking Long-Term Temporal Understanding in Remote Sensing

TL;DR - GeoChrono is a remote-sensing multimodal model designed to track and reason about geographic evolution over long time horizons. It establishes new benchmarks and substantially outperforms mainstream commercial MLLMs while reducing visual-token usage.

• ChronoBench contains 12 tasks and 17,689 validated QA pairs across perception, temporal recognition, long-term memory, and spatiotemporal reasoning.
• Evaluations identify long-term memory as the largest gap between mainstream MLLMs and human experts.
• GeoChrono models fixed geographic locations as evolving temporal trajectories and prioritizes dynamic regions during token compression.
• It exceeds leading commercial MLLMs by over 20%; its compressor reduces visual tokens by over 56% while retaining 94.6% of GeoChrono’s performance.