RareFlow: Physics-Aware Flow-Matching for Cross-Sensor Super-Resolution of Rare-Earth Features

Abstract

Super-resolution (SR) for remote sensing imagery often fails under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions, such as rare geomorphic features captured by diverse sensors, producing visually plausible but physically inaccurate results. We present RareFlow, a physics-aware SR framework designed for OOD robustness. RareFlow's core is a dual-conditioning architecture. A Gated ControlNet preserves fine-grained geometric fidelity from the low-resolution input, while textual prompts provide semantic guidance for synthesizing complex features. To ensure physically sound outputs, we introduce a multifaceted loss function that enforces both spectral and radiometric consistency with sensor properties. Furthermore, the framework quantifies its own predictive uncertainty by employing a stochastic forward pass approach; the resulting output variance directly identifies unfamiliar inputs, mitigating feature hallucination. We validate RareFlow on a new, curated benchmark of multi-sensor satellite imagery. In blind evaluations, geophysical experts rated our model's outputs as approaching the fidelity of ground truth imagery, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. This qualitative superiority is corroborated by quantitative gains in perceptual metrics, including a nearly 40\% reduction in FID. RareFlow provides a robust framework for high-fidelity synthesis in data-scarce scientific domains and offers a new paradigm for controlled generation under severe domain shift.