Beyond Quadratic: Linear-Time Change Detection with RWKV

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Zhenyu, Pei, Gensheng, Chen, Tao, Yuan, Xia, Zhang, Haofeng, Shu, Xiangbo, Yao, Yazhou
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yang, Zhenyu
Pei, Gensheng
Chen, Tao
Yuan, Xia
Zhang, Haofeng
Shu, Xiangbo
Yao, Yazhou
author_facet Yang, Zhenyu
Pei, Gensheng
Chen, Tao
Yuan, Xia
Zhang, Haofeng
Shu, Xiangbo
Yao, Yazhou
contents Existing paradigms for remote sensing change detection are caught in a trade-off: CNNs excel at efficiency but lack global context, while Transformers capture long-range dependencies at a prohibitive computational cost. This paper introduces ChangeRWKV, a new architecture that reconciles this conflict. By building upon the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) framework, our ChangeRWKV uniquely combines the parallelizable training of Transformers with the linear-time inference of RNNs. Our approach core features two key innovations: a hierarchical RWKV encoder that builds multi-resolution feature representation, and a novel Spatial-Temporal Fusion Module (STFM) engineered to resolve spatial misalignments across scales while distilling fine-grained temporal discrepancies. ChangeRWKV not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LEVIR-CD benchmark, with an 85.46% IoU and 92.16% F1 score, but does so while drastically reducing parameters and FLOPs compared to previous leading methods. This work demonstrates a new, efficient, and powerful paradigm for operational-scale change detection. Our code and model are publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_19606
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Quadratic: Linear-Time Change Detection with RWKV
Yang, Zhenyu
Pei, Gensheng
Chen, Tao
Yuan, Xia
Zhang, Haofeng
Shu, Xiangbo
Yao, Yazhou
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Existing paradigms for remote sensing change detection are caught in a trade-off: CNNs excel at efficiency but lack global context, while Transformers capture long-range dependencies at a prohibitive computational cost. This paper introduces ChangeRWKV, a new architecture that reconciles this conflict. By building upon the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) framework, our ChangeRWKV uniquely combines the parallelizable training of Transformers with the linear-time inference of RNNs. Our approach core features two key innovations: a hierarchical RWKV encoder that builds multi-resolution feature representation, and a novel Spatial-Temporal Fusion Module (STFM) engineered to resolve spatial misalignments across scales while distilling fine-grained temporal discrepancies. ChangeRWKV not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LEVIR-CD benchmark, with an 85.46% IoU and 92.16% F1 score, but does so while drastically reducing parameters and FLOPs compared to previous leading methods. This work demonstrates a new, efficient, and powerful paradigm for operational-scale change detection. Our code and model are publicly available.
title Beyond Quadratic: Linear-Time Change Detection with RWKV
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19606