# SemiCD-VL: Visual-Language Model Guidance Makes Better Semi-supervised Change Detector

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04788 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04788/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 40 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/prompt-learning-and-adaptation-of-clip/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [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 Survey on Deep Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00550/) (2021)
- [A Transformer-Based Siamese Network for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01293/) (2022)
- [A Simple Baseline for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Pre-trained Vision-language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14757/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Unreliable Pseudo-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03884/) (2022)
- [Decoupling Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07910/) (2021)
- [ST++: Make Self-training Work Better for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05095/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Consistency in Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09910/) (2022)
- [ZegCLIP: Towards Adapting CLIP for Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03588/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Learning for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07934/) (2018)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with High- and Low-level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05724/) (2019)
- [Guided Collaborative Training for Pixel-wise Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05258/) (2020)
- [Changer: Feature Interaction is What You Need for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08290/) (2022)
- [Change is Everywhere: Single-Temporal Supervised Object Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07002/) (2021)
- [Aligning and Prompting Everything All at Once for Universal Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02153/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [DynamicEarth: How Far are We from Open-Vocabulary Change Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12931/) (2025)
- [SegEarth-OV3: Exploring SAM 3 for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08730/) (2025)
- [DGTRSD & DGTRS-CLIP: A Dual-Granularity Remote Sensing Image-Text Dataset and Vision Language Foundation Model for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19311/) (2025)
- [Seg2Change: Adapting Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation Model for Remote Sensing Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11231/) (2026)
- [MV-CC: Mask Enhanced Video Model for Remote Sensing Change Caption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23946/) (2024)
- [ViLaCD-R1: A Vision-Language Framework for Semantic Change Detection in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23244/) (2025)
- [SAM-Based Building Change Detection with Distribution-Aware Fourier Adaptation and Edge-Constrained Warping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12619/) (2025)
- [OpenDPR: Open-Vocabulary Change Detection via Vision-Centric Diffusion-Guided Prototype Retrieval for Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27645/) (2026)
- [Detect Changes like Humans: Incorporating Semantic Priors for Improved Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16918/) (2024)
- [RS-MTDF: Multi-Teacher Distillation and Fusion for Remote Sensing Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08772/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Model Purified Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00202/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Change Detection Methods for their Application to Serac Fall Time-Lapse Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28100/) (2026)
- [Multi-Modal Building Change Detection for Large-Scale Small Changes: Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19077/) (2026)
- [SCD4VPR: Multi-modal Scene Change Detection for Long-term Visual Place Recognition Database Update](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11402/) (2026)
- [Curriculum-guided Change Detection Training: Toward Accurate Serac Fall Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28012/) (2026)
- [JL1-CC&QA: Extending the JL1-CD Benchmark with Change Captioning and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31745/) (2026)
- [CogVis: Must Open-Vocabulary Change Detection Perceive the Scene Anew for Every Query?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06150/) (2026)
- [From Change Captions to Change Detection: Semantic-Appearance Agreement Framework for Remote Sensing Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28192/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Change Detection (CD) aims to identify pixels with semantic changes between images. However, annotating massive numbers of pixel-level images is labor-intensive and costly, especially for multi-temporal images, which require pixel-wise comparisons by human experts. Considering the excellent performance of visual language models (VLMs) for zero-shot, open-vocabulary, etc. with prompt-based reasoning, it is promising to utilize VLMs to make better CD under limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a VLM guidance-based semi-supervised CD method, namely SemiCD-VL. The insight of SemiCD-VL is to synthesize free change labels using VLMs to provide additional supervision signals for unlabeled data. However, almost all current VLMs are designed for single-temporal images and cannot be directly applied to bi- or multi-temporal images. Motivated by this, we first propose a VLM-based mixed change event generation (CEG) strategy to yield pseudo labels for unlabeled CD data. Since the additional supervised signals provided by these VLM-driven pseudo labels may conflict with the pseudo labels from the consistency regularization paradigm (e.g. FixMatch), we propose the dual projection head for de-entangling different signal sources. Further, we explicitly decouple the bi-temporal images semantic representation through two auxiliary segmentation decoders, which are also guided by VLM. Finally, to make the model more adequately capture change representations, we introduce metric-aware supervision by feature-level contrastive loss in auxiliary branches. Extensive experiments show the advantage of SemiCD-VL. For instance, SemiCD-VL improves the FixMatch baseline by +5.3 IoU on WHU-CD and by +2.4 IoU on LEVIR-CD with 5% labels. In addition, our CEG strategy, in an un-supervised manner, can achieve performance far superior to state-of-the-art un-supervised CD methods.