The Gap Is in the Geometry: A Convergent Meta-Analysis of Multi-Facet Aerial and Remote Sensing Video Understanding

Abstract

Aerial and remote sensing video is increasingly evaluated like web video, by posing multiple-choice questions to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) over sampled frames and reporting accuracy. This paper argues that this recipe measures the wrong aspect, and supports the claim with a convergent meta-analysis of a broad set of published results, organized in four evidence tiers, in which a claim becomes a position only when collected evidence agrees. Parameter scale exhibits a median of +3.4 accuracy points per tenfold increase on aerial benchmarks, far below a human gap of at least 19 points, whereas acquisition conditions control perception, as 315 of 318 evaluations in 19 within-paper contrasts lose accuracy when conditions such as altitude, view, object size or time horizon become harder. No aerial benchmark in the corpus combines video input with per-task human and random baselines, competence collapses from answering to acting in closed-loop navigation, and the same MLLMs score higher on the aerial benchmark than on ground spatial ones, but lower on studies that test cross-view geometry. From these findings the current study derives five falsifiable principles and proposes the AVU-Card, a reporting card for aerial video benchmarks