Datasets:
license: cc-by-4.0
pretty_name: GeoPathfinder
task_categories:
- image-classification
tags:
- remote-sensing
- earth-observation
- landsat
- long-range-reasoning
- benchmark
- geospatial
size_categories:
- 10K<n<100K
GeoPathfinder
A Pathfinder-style long-range spatial reasoning benchmark on real satellite
imagery. Each sample is a 256×256 Landsat patch (native 30 m resolution, a
7.7×7.7 km footprint) with two red dots on land; the task is to predict whether
the dots are connected by land (connect = 1) or separated by water
(disconnect = 0). Labels derive from Overture Maps water polygons rasterized
onto the exact pixel grid of each patch and cross-checked against Landsat's own
QA water flag.
- 5,273 patches → 10,546 images across 42 river basins on six continents, exactly class-balanced (each patch yields one connect and one disconnect sample, distance-matched within 25% so dot separation carries no label signal)
- Adversarial dot placement: each released pair is the most deceptive of a large candidate pool (96 for train/val, 256 for test), deterministic given the masks — randomly placed dots admit a sight-line shortcut
- Fixed 80/10/10 patch-level splits (paired images never straddle a split).
A basin-disjoint protocol
(
splits_basin.json, repo root) holds out four basins on four continents for geographic-generalization tests eval_variants/ships a fixed easy/medium/hard placement suite (1,051 images per tier): report per-tier accuracy and the macro average (placement-general score) alongside test accuracy- Code, construction pipeline, baselines: https://github.com/isaaccorley/geo-long-range-arena
Download
The full dataset ships as a single archive that extracts to a geopathfinder/
folder:
hf download isaaccorley/GeoPathfinder geopathfinder.tar.gz --repo-type dataset --local-dir .
tar -xzf geopathfinder.tar.gz
metadata.parquet and water_polygons.parquet are also available uncompressed
at the repo root for querying without downloading the archive.
Files (inside geopathfinder.tar.gz)
pathfinder/connect/ patch_XXXXX.jpg benchmark image, label = 1
pathfinder/disconnect/ patch_XXXXX.jpg benchmark image, label = 0
images/ patch_XXXXX.jpg true color without dots (pristine)
raw/ patch_XXXXX.tif uint16 RGBN surface-reflectance DNs,
scale/offset in band metadata, scene
provenance in file tags (ZSTD)
masks/ patch_XXXXX.png 0=land 1=water 2=invalid 3=suspect
overlays/ patch_XXXXX.jpg water mask blended over true color (QC)
metadata.parquet one row per patch: split, region, scene
id, bounds, CRS/transform, QC stats,
dot pixel + lon/lat coordinates
water_polygons.parquet 281k Overture water polygons clipped to
patch bounds (GeoParquet, WGS84), keyed
by sample_id; geometry_patch_crs holds
the same shapes as WKB in each patch's
UTM CRS (patch_crs column)
splits.json train/val/test patch ids
plan.json build configuration snapshot
Rasterizing a patch's rows from water_polygons.parquet onto its
transform/crs (in metadata.parquet) reproduces its stored mask
(IoU ≥ 0.999).
Quick start
import pandas as pd
meta = pd.read_parquet("metadata.parquet")
train = meta[meta.split == "train"]
# each labeled patch contributes two images:
# pathfinder/connect/{sample_id}.jpg label 1
# pathfinder/disconnect/{sample_id}.jpg label 0
Raw reflectance (for geospatial foundation models — dots are not burned into
these; use the dot coordinates from metadata.parquet):
import rasterio
with rasterio.open("raw/patch_00122.tif") as src:
reflectance = src.read().astype("float32") * src.scales[0] + src.offsets[0]
Baselines
Two numbers per model: accuracy on the released test split, and the placement-general score (macro accuracy over the easy/medium/hard suite, seed-42 checkpoints). Accuracies are mean ± std over three seeds.
Reference pipelines and probes:
| approach | test acc | macro |
|---|---|---|
| Water index (blue-red on RGB), no learning | 52.8% | 54.1 |
| Water index (NDWI on green/NIR), no learning | 69.9% | 76.2 |
| U-Net masks -> connected components | 69.2 ± 0.6% | 78.2 ± 1.1 |
| Best frozen linear probe (13 pretrainings) | 62.7% | — |
Architectures (fine-tuned on the released placements, three-seed means):
| model | test acc | macro |
|---|---|---|
| MambaVision-B (ext. recipe) | 88.0 ± 0.6% | 62.7 ± 0.7 |
| OverLoCK-B | 88.0 ± 0.8% | 62.1 ± 1.2 |
| FocalNet-B LRF | 87.8 ± 0.4% | 62.2 ± 1.1 |
| MaxViT-B | 87.5 ± 0.9% | 61.0 ± 4.4 |
| ConvNeXt-B | 87.2 ± 0.9% | 61.0 ± 0.5 |
| FocalNet-B SRF | 86.8 ± 0.6% | 61.0 ± 0.9 |
| UniRepLKNet-T | 86.6 ± 1.0% | 60.7 ± 0.9 |
| RepLKNet-31B (ext. recipe) | 86.4 ± 0.8% | 60.7 ± 0.6 |
| MambaOut-B | 86.4 ± 0.3% | 62.0 ± 1.5 |
| DaViT-B (2/3 seeds converge) | 86.4 ± 0.5% | 59.9 ± 1.3 |
| ResNet-50 | 85.3 ± 0.6% | 59.0 ± 1.0 |
| Swin-B | 83.7 ± 1.3% | 58.5 ± 2.2 |
| ViT-B/16 (ext. recipe) | 82.0 ± 1.0% | 56.4 ± 1.2 |
| ResNet-18 (scratch) | 78.0 ± 0.4% | 53.2 ± 1.1 |
All fourteen architectures land between 53.2 and 62.7 macro (a further 22 size/pretraining/weight variants stay inside 58-65). Every model trained on the released placements collapses on the macro score (models learn "the obvious answer is wrong" and fail easy placements); retraining with dots resampled every epoch recovers up to 85.1 ± 0.3 macro (MaxViT) while the hard tier stays around 75% — the benchmark is far from solved. Marker shape and color barely matter (±2 points). Full protocol and training recipes: https://github.com/isaaccorley/geo-long-range-arena
Provenance and licensing
- Imagery: Landsat Collection 2 Level-2 (USGS, public domain), accessed via the
Microsoft Planetary Computer. Scene ids, WRS path/row, and acquisition times
are embedded in each GeoTIFF and in
metadata.parquet. - Water geometry: Overture Maps
base/water(release 2026-06-17.0), which includes OSM-derived data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Thewater_polygons.parquetandmasks/layers are therefore available under ODbL; annotations and imagery composites are CC-BY-4.0.
Citation
@misc{corley2026geopathfinder,
title = {GeoPathfinder: Long-Range Spatial Reasoning in Satellite Imagery},
author = {Corley, Isaac},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/isaaccorley/GeoPathfinder}
}