MGRL-RSCC: Multi-Granularity Reward Reinforcement Learning for Fine-Grained Remote Sensing Change Captioning

Abstract

Remote Sensing Change Captioning (RSCC), which aims to generate accurate and detailed linguistic descriptions of ground object variations from bi-temporal remote sensing images, is a critical and challenging task in intelligent remote sensing interpretation. The mainstream autoregressive training paradigm faces severe exposure bias and train-test distribution mismatch, resulting in cumulative generation errors. They tend to produce conservative and template-fixed captions while ignoring subtle scene change details. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel multi-granularity reward reinforcement learning paradigm, termed MGRL-RSCC. Specifically, we first leverage a CNN and hierarchical self-attention module to extract and enhance visual features from bi-temporal remote sensing images. A Transformer decoder is then utilized to complete visual-to-linguistic translation. Different from existing methods, we design a dual-decoding strategy and a two-stage joint optimization scheme, which combines token-level supervised learning via greedy decoding and multi-granularity reward-driven self-critical reinforcement learning via sampling decoding. We further construct three complementary reward functions covering linguistic fluency, change state consistency, and structural-semantic relevance to comprehensively optimize caption quality and alleviate false and missing change descriptions. Extensive experiments on multiple public RSCC benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MGRL-RSCC effectively mitigates exposure bias and conservative generation problems in traditional autoregressive methods. The source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/MGRL-RSCC