# Balanced Multi-Task Attention for Satellite Image Classification: A Systematic Approach to Achieving 97.23% Accuracy on EuroSAT Without Pre-Training

Source: [Balanced Multi-Task Attention for Satellite Image Classification: A Systematic Approach to Achieving 97.23% Accuracy on EuroSAT Without Pre-Training](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa7c461e209131cea8d598>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-28T10:38:22.670Z

Authors: Aditya Vir

Published: 2025-10-17T10:59:24.000Z

## Abstract

This work presents a systematic investigation of custom convolutional neural network architectures for satellite land use classification, achieving 97.23% test accuracy on the EuroSAT dataset without reliance on pre-trained models. Through three progressive architectural iterations (baseline: 94.30%, CBAM-enhanced: 95.98%, and balanced multi-task attention: 97.23%) we identify and address specific failure modes in satellite imagery classification. Our principal contribution is a novel balanced multi-task attention mechanism that combines Coordinate Attention for spatial feature extraction with Squeeze-Excitation blocks for spectral feature extraction, unified through a learnable fusion parameter. Experimental results demonstrate that this learnable parameter autonomously converges to alpha approximately 0.57, indicating near-equal importance of spatial and spectral modalities for satellite imagery. We employ progressive DropBlock regularization (5-20% by network depth) and class-balanced loss weighting to address overfitting and confusion pattern imbalance. The final 12-layer architecture achieves Cohen's Kappa of 0.9692 with all classes exceeding 94.46% accuracy, demonstrating confidence calibration with a 24.25% gap between correct and incorrect predictions. Our approach achieves performance within 1.34% of fine-tuned ResNet-50 (98.57%) while requiring no external data, validating the efficacy of systematic architectural design for domain-specific applications. Complete code, trained models, and evaluation scripts are publicly available.

## Recorded benchmark results

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## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15527>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15527.pdf>)