# Changes-Aware Transformer: Learning Generalized Changes Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.13619 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13619/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [Deeply-Supervised Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.5185/) (2014)
- [Fully Convolutional Siamese Networks for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08462/) (2018)
- [Remote Sensing Image Change Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00208/) (2021)
- [A Transformer-Based Siamese Network for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01293/) (2022)
- [Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11681/) (2021)
- [Nested Hierarchical Transformer: Towards Accurate, Data-Efficient and Interpretable Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12723/) (2021)
- [Building Change Detection for Remote Sensing Images Using a Dual Task Constrained Deep Siamese Convolutional Network Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07726/) (2019)
- [DASNet: Dual attentive fully convolutional siamese networks for change detection of high resolution satellite images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03608/) (2020)
- [Temporal-Channel Transformer for 3D Lidar-Based Video Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13628/) (2020)
- [AO2-DETR: Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12785/) (2022)
- [DR-TANet: Dynamic Receptive Temporal Attention Network for Street Scene Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00879/) (2021)
- [MFGNet: Dynamic Modality-Aware Filter Generation for RGB-T Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10433/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Information-Bottleneck Driven Binary Neural Network for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03504/) (2025)
- [Detect Changes like Humans: Incorporating Semantic Priors for Improved Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16918/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Difference features obtained by comparing the images of two periods play an indispensable role in the change detection (CD) task. However, a pair of bi-temporal images can exhibit diverse changes, which may cause various difference features. Identifying changed pixels with differ difference features to be the same category is thus a challenge for CD. Most nowadays' methods acquire distinctive difference features in implicit ways like enhancing image representation or supervision information. Nevertheless, informative image features only guarantee object semantics are modeled and can not guarantee that changed pixels have similar semantics in the difference feature space and are distinct from those unchanged ones. In this work, the generalized representation of various changes is learned straightforwardly in the difference feature space, and a novel Changes-Aware Transformer (CAT) for refining difference features is proposed. This generalized representation can perceive which pixels are changed and which are unchanged and further guide the update of pixels' difference features. CAT effectively accomplishes this refinement process through the stacked cosine cross-attention layer and self-attention layer. After refinement, the changed pixels in the difference feature space are closer to each other, which facilitates change detection. In addition, CAT is compatible with various backbone networks and existing CD methods. Experiments on remote sensing CD data set and street scene CD data set show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and has excellent generalization.