Shortcut Learning in Geospatial Foundation Model Embeddings for Cross-Disaster Damage Assessment

Ali Shibli, Andrea Nascetti, Yifang Ban

Geospatial foundation models can support disaster damage assessment, but high accuracy on familiar disasters may hide shortcut learning: prediction from event or scene characteristics rather than evidence that transfers to a new disaster. We study embeddings from TerraMind, Prithvi-EO-2.0, DOFA, and DINOv3 on the multi-disaster datasets xView2 and BRIGHT. Holding out an entire disaster, instead of randomly splitting image tiles, reduces mean balanced accuracy from 0.807 to 0.638 on xView2 and from 0.818 to 0.568 on BRIGHT. Four sets of tests examine what information supports prediction: event and acquisition context, before/after image inputs, building count, and correct image pairing. Pre-event images remain predictive, and a classifier given only the annotated number of buildings reaches balanced accuracy of 0.629 and 0.653. Combining before/after features performs best on average on xView2, but does not improve over pre-only features on BRIGHT. Shuffling image pairs within the same disaster and damage class causes modest losses. Motivated by these findings, we test whether feature transformations learned only from training disasters improve generalization to unseen disasters.…