# Selective Tool Use for Agentic Change Visual Question Answering in Remote Sensing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14523 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14523/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 8 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Change-Agent: Towards Interactive Comprehensive Remote Sensing Change Interpretation and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19646/) (2024)
- [RS-Agent: Automating Remote Sensing Tasks through Intelligent Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07089/) (2024)
- [Change Detection Meets Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06343/) (2021)
- [ChangeChat: An Interactive Model for Remote Sensing Change Analysis via Multimodal Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08582/) (2024)
- [Show Me What and Where has Changed? Question Answering and Grounding for Remote Sensing Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23828/) (2024)
- [Foundation Model-Driven Semantic Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13780/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Change VQA in Remote Sensing with Structured and Native Multimodal Qwen Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18429/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Change visual question answering (Change VQA) requires understanding semantic changes across bi-temporal remote sensing images. Although vision language models (VLMs) have shown promising performance on this task, they remain unreliable when answering questions that require explicit transition statistics, area measurements, or spatial information. To address this limitation, we propose a selective tool use framework in which a single VLM either answers directly or invokes a deterministic change analysis tool to obtain question specific evidence. Specifically, the selected tool operates on bi-temporal semantic maps and returns a structured observation, which the same VLM uses to generate its final answer. To support this framework, we construct a tool augmented extension of CDVQA covering eight question families and three tools for transition, spatial, and temporal analysis. Tool use supervision and observations are derived automatically from the original semantic annotations, without additional manual labeling. We then adapt Qwen3.5-4B using Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to jointly learn direct answering, tool invocation, and evidence conditioned answering. Experiments on 7,164 test questions show that selective tool use with reference semantic maps improves overall accuracy from 73.77% to 88.79% and average family accuracy from 69.11% to 89.65%. When the semantic maps are predicted automatically, the framework achieves 77.47% overall accuracy and 75.06% average family accuracy. These results demonstrate the benefit of question-specific semantic evidence for Change VQA, while highlighting the influence of semantic prediction quality on the resulting performance. Code and tool-augmented annotations will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yakoubbazi/ToolChangeVQA.