Embedding-Only Uplink for Onboard Retrieval Under Shift in Remote Sensing

arXiv:2604.03301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Downlink bottlenecks motivate onboard systems that prioritize hazards without transmitting raw pixels. We study a strict setting where a ground station uplinks only compact embeddings plus metadata, and an onboard system performs vector search to triage new captures. We ask whether this embedding-only pipeline remains useful under explicit remote-sensing shift: cross-time (pre/post-event), cross-event/location (different disasters), cross-site cl