Evaluation of Vision-Language Models Across Diverse Coastal Environments — Paper

Abstract

Vision-language models (VLMs) enable robotic per- ception by associating visual observations with natural-language concepts. Yet their performance in coastal environments remains largely unexplored. We introduce a densely labeled coastal dataset containing more than 1,000 images collected across seven missions in three regions of Oahu, Hawaii, with 18 semantic classes and over 7,400 annotated instances. We evaluate seven modern VLMs through three complementary experiments mea- suring text-to-mask, mask-to-mask, and mask-to-text alignment. Broad landscape classes are generally recognized more accurately than conventional object and coastal classes, with coastal con- cepts presenting the greatest challenge. However, comparisons of shared conventional classes across coastal and terrestrial datasets reveal no consistent performance difference attributable solely to environmental context. Mask-to-mask matching also remains similar across conventional and coastal classes, while alternative textual labels substantially improve recognition of several coastal concepts. These results suggest that lower performance on coastal classes (at least on the objects/query categories evaluated) is heavily influenced by segmentation and linguistic representation.

Authors 5

Seth Knoop, Chad R. Samuelson, Gabriel R. Slade, Brady Moon, Joshua G. Mangelson

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.10855
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: new
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.10855
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.10855
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.CV
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Each value shows its source, tier and observation time. Conflicting claims are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. How AI Atlas records facts →

Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

2 h ago

Conflicts

None

No models linked to this paper yet.

Authors: Seth Knoop, Chad R. Samuelson, Gabriel R. Slade

As of

Rewind the record: see this entity's attributes exactly as AI Atlas knew them on a given day.

Claim history · arXiv id

1 claims · 1 propertiesShow all properties

arXiv idarxiv_id1

Claim history for arXiv id
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
2609.10855	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperEvaluation of Vision-Language Models Across Diverse Coastal Environments
New paper: Evaluation of Vision-Language Models Across Diverse Coastal Environments
arxiv
rss.arxiv.org

Full timeline →

Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CV	feed	T1· Official	2 min ago	1

Tier 1 = official/primary, 2 = quality secondary, 3 = community, 4 = unverified. Every snapshot is archived; see all sources and the methodology.