Text Before Vision: Staged Knowledge Injection Matters for Agentic RLVR in Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Understanding

Abstract

Multimodal reasoning for ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing (RS) is usually bottlenecked by visual evidence acquisition: the model necessities localizing tiny task-relevant regions in massive pixel spaces. While Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) using zoom-in tools offers a path forward, we find that standard reinforcement learning struggles to navigate these vast visual spaces without structured domain priors. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between post-training paradigms: comparing Cold-start Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), RLVR, and Agentic RLVR on the UHR RS benchmark. Our controlled studies yield a counter-intuitive finding: high-quality Earth-science text-only QA is a primary driver of UHR visual reasoning gains. Despite lacking images, domain-specific text injects the concepts, mechanistic explanations, and decision rules necessary to guide visual evidence retrieval. Based on this, we propose a staged knowledge injection recipe: (1) cold-starting with scalable, knowledge-graph-verified Earth-science text QA to instill reasoning structures; and (2) "pre-warming'' on the same hard UHR image–text examples during SFT to stabilize and amplify subsequent tool-based RL. This approach achieves a 60.04\% Pass@1 on XLRS-Bench, significantly outperforming larger general-purpose models (e.g., GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.0 Pro, Intern-S1) and establishing a new state-of-the-art. We provide both the automated data pipeline and the rigorous ablation studies that validate this "Text-Before-Vision'' paradigm. Datasets and code will be released.