# A Lightweight Sparse Focus Transformer for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06598 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06598/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [CSWin Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Cross-Shaped Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00652/) (2021)
- [Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4389/) (2014)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [Axial Attention in Multidimensional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12180/) (2019)
- [Knowing When to Look: Adaptive Attention via A Visual Sentinel for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01887/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Explanations: Justifying Decisions and Pointing to the Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08129/) (2018)
- [FLatten Transformer: Vision Transformer using Focused Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00442/) (2023)
- [From Show to Tell: A Survey on Deep Learning-based Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06912/) (2021)
- [RegionViT: Regional-to-Local Attention for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02689/) (2021)
- [Shuffle Transformer: Rethinking Spatial Shuffle for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03650/) (2021)
- [Fast Vision Transformers with HiLo Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13213/) (2022)
- [FasterViT: Fast Vision Transformers with Hierarchical Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06189/) (2023)
- [MSG-Transformer: Exchanging Local Spatial Information by Manipulating Messenger Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15168/) (2021)
- [Changes to Captions: An Attentive Network for Remote Sensing Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01091/) (2023)
- [Progressive Scale-aware Network for Remote sensing Image Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00355/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [RSUniVLM: A Unified Vision Language Model for Remote Sensing via Granularity-oriented Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05679/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Perception of Key Changes in Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12612/) (2024)
- [CCExpert: Advancing MLLM Capability in Remote Sensing Change Captioning with Difference-Aware Integration and a Foundational Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11360/) (2024)
- [Mask Approximation Net: A Novel Diffusion Model Approach for Remote Sensing Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19179/) (2024)
- [DeltaVLM: Interactive Remote Sensing Image Change Analysis via Instruction-guided Difference Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22346/) (2025)
- [MGIMM: Multi-Granularity Instruction Multimodal Model for Attribute-Guided Remote Sensing Image Detailed Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04716/) (2024)
- [SAM Guided Semantic and Motion Changed Region Mining for Remote Sensing Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21420/) (2025)
- [EchoChange: A Diffusion Language Model with Dual Pass Remasking for Factual Remote Sensing Disaster Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01856/) (2026)
- [ChangeQuery: Advancing Remote Sensing Change Analysis for Natural and Human-Induced Disasters from Visual Detection to Semantic Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22333/) (2026)
- [HiSem: Hierarchical Semantic Disentangling for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15024/) (2026)
- [Beyond Pixel Diffs: Benchmarking Image Change Captioning for Web UI Visual Regression Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01728/) (2026)
- [LBTCap: A Lightweight Bilateral Transformer for Real-Time Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03320/) (2026)
- [MGRL-RSCC: Multi-Granularity Reward Reinforcement Learning for Fine-Grained Remote Sensing Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26166/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) aims to automatically generate sentences that describe content differences in remote sensing bitemporal images. Recently, attention-based transformers have become a prevalent idea for capturing the features of global change. However, existing transformer-based RSICC methods face challenges, e.g., high parameters and high computational complexity caused by the self-attention operation in the transformer encoder component. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes a Sparse Focus Transformer (SFT) for the RSICC task. Specifically, the SFT network consists of three main components, i.e. a high-level features extractor based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), a sparse focus attention mechanism-based transformer encoder network designed to locate and capture changing regions in dual-temporal images, and a description decoder that embeds images and words to generate sentences for captioning differences. The proposed SFT network can reduce the parameter number and computational complexity by incorporating a sparse attention mechanism within the transformer encoder network. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that even with a reduction of over 90% in parameters and computational complexity for the transformer encoder, our proposed network can still obtain competitive performance compared to other state-of-the-art RSICC methods. The code is available at hrefhttps://github.com/sundongwei/SFTchag2capLiteChag2cap.