Jiafan Zhang

Chenyang Liu, Jiafan Zhang, Keyan Chen et al.

The interpretation of multi-temporal remote sensing imagery is critical for monitoring Earth's dynamic processes-yet previous change detection methods, which produce binary or semantic masks, fall short of providing human-readable insights into changes. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have opened a new frontier by fusing visual and linguistic modalities, enabling spatio-temporal vision-language understanding: models that not only capture spatial and temporal dependencies to recognize changes but also provide a richer interactive semantic analysis of temporal images (e.g., generate descriptive captions and answer natural-language queries). In this survey, we present the first comprehensive review of RS-STVLMs. The survey covers the evolution of models from early task-specific models to recent general foundation models that leverage powerful large language models. We discuss progress in representative tasks, such as change captioning, change question answering, and change grounding. Moreover, we systematically dissect the fundamental components and key technologies underlying these models, and review the datasets and evaluation metrics that have driven the field. By synthesizing task-level insights with a deep dive into shared architectural patterns, we aim to illuminate current achievements and chart promising directions for future research in spatio-temporal vision-language understanding for remote sensing. We will keep tracing related works at https://github.com/Chen-Yang-Liu/Awesome-RS-SpatioTemporal-VLMs

Keyan Chen, Chenyang Liu, Bowen Chen et al.

Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation provides a flexible and fine-grained framework for remote sensing scene analysis via vision-language collaborative interpretation. Current approaches predominantly utilize a three-stage pipeline encompassing dual-modal encoding, cross-modal interaction, and pixel decoding. These methods demonstrate significant limitations in managing complex semantic relationships and achieving precise cross-modal alignment, largely due to their coupled processing mechanism that conflates target localization with boundary delineation. This architectural coupling amplifies error propagation under semantic ambiguity while restricting model generalizability and interpretability. To address these issues, we propose RSRefSeg 2, a decoupling paradigm that reformulates the conventional workflow into a collaborative dual-stage framework: coarse localization followed by fine segmentation. RSRefSeg 2 integrates CLIP's cross-modal alignment strength with SAM's segmentation generalizability through strategic foundation model collaboration. Specifically, CLIP is employed as the dual-modal encoder to activate target features within its pre-aligned semantic space and generate localization prompts. To mitigate CLIP's misactivation challenges in multi-entity scenarios described by referring texts, a cascaded second-order prompter is devised, which enhances precision through implicit reasoning via decomposition of text embeddings into complementary semantic subspaces. These optimized semantic prompts subsequently direct the SAM to generate pixel-level refined masks, thereby completing the semantic transmission pipeline. Extensive experiments (RefSegRS, RRSIS-D, and RISBench) demonstrate that RSRefSeg 2 surpasses contemporary methods in segmentation accuracy (+~3% gIoU) and complex semantic interpretation. Code is available at: https://github.com/KyanChen/RSRefSeg2.