# ViLaCD-R1: A Vision-Language Framework for Semantic Change Detection in Remote Sensing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23244 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23244/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07615/) (2025)
- [Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01785/) (2025)
- [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)
- [VLP: A Survey on Vision-Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09061/) (2022)
- [Self-Rewarding Vision-Language Model via Reasoning Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19652/) (2025)
- [DASNet: Dual attentive fully convolutional siamese networks for change detection of high resolution satellite images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03608/) (2020)
- [TEOChat: A Large Vision-Language Assistant for Temporal Earth Observation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06234/) (2024)
- [Change-Agent: Towards Interactive Comprehensive Remote Sensing Change Interpretation and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19646/) (2024)
- [Text4Seg: Reimagining Image Segmentation as Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09855/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images: Comprehensive Review and Meta-Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05612/) (2020)
- [DARNet: Deep Active Ray Network for Building Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05889/) (2019)
- [HANet: A Hierarchical Attention Network for Change Detection With Bitemporal Very-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09178/) (2024)
- [ChangeChat: An Interactive Model for Remote Sensing Change Analysis via Multimodal Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08582/) (2024)
- [Geo-R1: Improving Few-Shot Geospatial Referring Expression Understanding with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21976/) (2025)
- [ELGC-Net: Efficient Local-Global Context Aggregation for Remote Sensing Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17909/) (2024)
- [SemiCD-VL: Visual-Language Model Guidance Makes Better Semi-supervised Change Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04788/) (2024)
- [TransY-Net:Learning Fully Transformer Networks for Change Detection of Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14214/) (2023)
- [MaskCD: A Remote Sensing Change Detection Network Based on Mask Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12081/) (2024)
- [RARL: Improving Medical VLM Reasoning and Generalization with Reinforcement Learning and LoRA under Data and Hardware Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06600/) (2025)
- [Single-Temporal Supervised Learning for Universal Remote Sensing Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15694/) (2024)
- [STANet: A Novel Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Network for Depression Classification with Small and Unbalanced FMRI Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21323/) (2024)
- [Exploring Foundation Models in Remote Sensing Image Change Detection: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07824/) (2024)
- [ICFNet: Integrated Cross-modal Fusion Network for Survival Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02778/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [AdaptOVCD: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Change Detection via Adaptive Information Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06529/) (2026)
- [ReA-OVCD: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Change Detection via Semantic-Spatial Reliability Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20032/) (2026)
- [FootprintNet: State-Transition-Guided Dynamic Footprint Learning for Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27969/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote sensing change detection (RSCD), a complex multi-image inference task, traditionally uses pixel-based operators or encoder-decoder networks that inadequately capture high-level semantics and are vulnerable to non-semantic perturbations. Although recent multimodal and vision-language model (VLM)-based approaches enhance semantic understanding of change regions by incorporating textual descriptions, they still suffer from challenges such as inaccurate spatial localization, imprecise pixel-level boundary delineation, and limited interpretability. To address these issues, we propose ViLaCD-R1, a two-stage framework comprising a Multi-Image Reasoner (MIR) and a Mask-Guided Decoder (MGD). Specifically, the VLM is trained through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) on block-level dual-temporal inference tasks, taking dual-temporal image patches as input and outputting a coarse change mask. Then, the decoder integrates dual-temporal image features with this coarse mask to predict a precise binary change map. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple RSCD benchmarks demonstrate that ViLaCD-R1 substantially improves true semantic change recognition and localization, robustly suppresses non-semantic variations, and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in complex real-world scenarios.