MaRS: A Multi-modality Very-high-resolution Remote Sensing Foundation Model with Cross-Granularity Meta-Modality Learning

Abstract The multi-modality remote sensing foundation model (MM-RSFM) has made notable progress recently. However, most existing approaches remain limited to medium-resolution, single-modality, restricting their performance in fine-grained downstream applications such as disaster response and urban planning. In this work, MaRS is proposed, a multi-modality very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing foundation model designed for cross-modality granularity interpretation of complex scenes. To achieve this, a multi-modality VHR SAR-optical dataset, MaRS-16M, is constructed through large-scale collection and semi-automated processing, comprising over 16 million paired samples. Unlike previous work, MaRS tackles two fundamental challenges in VHR SAR-optical self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques. Cross-granularity contrastive learning (CGCL) is introduced to alleviate alignment inconsistencies caused by imaging differences, and meta-modality attention (MMA) is designed to unify heterogeneous physical characteristics across modalities. Compared to existing remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) and general vision foundation models (VFMs), MaRS performs better as a pre-trained backbone across nine multi-modality VHR downstream tasks.