# CoRegOVCD: Consistency-Regularized Open-Vocabulary Change Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02160 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02160/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Fully Convolutional Siamese Networks for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08462/) (2018)
- [Grounding Everything: Emerging Localization Properties in Vision-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00878/) (2023)
- [Changer: Feature Interaction is What You Need for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08290/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Deep Slow Feature Analysis for Change Detection in Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00645/) (2018)
- [AWT: Transferring Vision-Language Models via Augmentation, Weighting, and Transportation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04603/) (2024)
- [Segment Change Model (SCM) for Unsupervised Change detection in VHR Remote Sensing Images: a Case Study of Buildings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16410/) (2023)
- [DynamicEarth: How Far are We from Open-Vocabulary Change Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12931/) (2025)
- [UniVCD: A New Method for Unsupervised Change Detection in the Open-Vocabulary Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13089/) (2025)
- [Referring Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11719/) (2025)
- [COMIC: An Unsupervised Change Detection Method for Heterogeneous Remote Sensing Images Based on Copula Mixtures and Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00721/) (2023)
- [AdaptOVCD: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Change Detection via Adaptive Information Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06529/) (2026)

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

- [CogVis: Must Open-Vocabulary Change Detection Perceive the Scene Anew for Every Query?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06150/) (2026)
- [Zero-OVCD: Bridging Training-Free Foundation Models and Pseudo-Label Learning for Open-Vocabulary Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11663/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote sensing change detection (CD) aims to identify where land-cover semantics change across time, but most existing methods still assume a fixed label space and therefore cannot answer arbitrary user-defined queries. Open-vocabulary change detection (OVCD) instead asks for the change mask of a queried concept. In the fully training-free setting, however, dense concept responses are difficult to compare directly across dates: appearance variation, weak cross-concept competition, and the spatial continuity of many land-cover categories often produce noisy, fragmented, and semantically unreliable change evidence. We propose Consistency-Regularized Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (CoRegOVCD), a training-free dense inference framework that reformulates concept-specific change as calibrated posterior discrepancy. Competitive Posterior Calibration (CPC) and the Semantic Posterior Delta (SPD) convert raw concept responses into competition-aware queried-concept posteriors and quantify their cross-temporal discrepancy, making semantic change evidence more comparable without explicit instance matching. Geometry-Token Consistency Gate (GeoGate) and Regional Consensus Discrepancy (RCD) further suppress unsupported responses and improve spatial coherence through geometry-aware structural verification and regional consensus. Across four benchmarks spanning building-oriented and multi-class settings, CoRegOVCD consistently improves over the strongest previous training-free baseline by 2.24 to 4.98 F1C points and reaches a six-class average of 47.50% F1C on SECOND.