Paper

RSRCC: A Remote Sensing Regional Change Comprehension Benchmark Constructed via Retrieval-Augmented Best-of-N Ranking

Yotam Gigi, Beryozkin, Genady, Shekel, Tomer, Leifman, George, Kazoom, Roie

2026

Overview

Traditional change detection identifies where changes occur, but does not explain what changed in natural language. Existing remote sensing change captioning datasets typically describe overall image-level differences, leaving fine-grained localized semantic reasoning largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present RSRCC, a new benchmark for remote sensing change question-answering containing 126k questions, split into 87k training, 17.1k validation, and 22k test instances. Unlike prior datasets, RSRCC is built around localized, change-specific questions that require reasoning about a particular semantic change. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first remote sensing change question-answering benchmark designed explicitly for such fine-grained reasoning-based supervision. To construct RSRCC, we introduce a hierarchical semi-supervised curation pipeline that uses Best-of-N ranking as a critical final ambiguity-resolution stage. First, candidate change regions are extracted from semantic segmentation masks, then initially screened using an image-text embedding model, and finally validated through retrieval-augmented vision-language curation with Best-of-N ranking. This process enables scalable filtering of noisy and ambiguous candidates while preserving semantically meaningful changes. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/RSRCC.

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Benchmarks / Change detection / Datasets / Natural language processing / Questions / Ranking / Reasoning / Remote sensing / Retrieval / Semantic segmentation / Semantics