UniRoute: Unified Routing Mixture-of-Experts for Modality-Adaptive Remote Sensing Change Detection

TL;DR

UniRoute introduces a unified, modality-adaptive framework for remote sensing change detection, leveraging routing-based modules to handle diverse data types and improve accuracy and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents UniRoute, a novel framework that reformulates feature extraction and fusion as conditional routing problems for modality-adaptive change detection.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on five datasets.

Balances accuracy and efficiency in a unified deployment.

Effectively handles heterogeneous and cross-modal scenarios.

Abstract

Current remote sensing change detection (CD) methods mainly rely on specialized models, which limits the scalability toward modality-adaptive Earth observation. For homogeneous CD, precise boundary delineation relies on fine-grained spatial cues and local pixel interactions, whereas heterogeneous CD instead requires broader contextual information to suppress speckle noise and geometric distortions. Moreover, difference operator (e.g., subtraction) works well for aligned homogeneous images but introduces artifacts in cross-modal or geometrically misaligned scenarios. Across different modality settings, specialized models based on static backbones or fixed difference operations often prove insufficient. To address this challenge, we propose UniRoute, a unified framework for modality-adaptive learning by reformulating feature extraction and fusion as conditional routing problems. We introduce an Adaptive Receptive Field Routing MoE (AR2-MoE) module to disentangle local spatial details from global semantic context, and a Modality-Aware Difference Routing MoE (MDR-MoE) module to adaptively select the most suitable fusion primitive at each pixel. In addition, we propose a Consistency-Aware Self-Distillation (CASD) strategy that stabilizes unified training under data-scarce heterogeneous settings by enforcing multi-level consistency. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that UniRoute achieves strong overall performance, with a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off under a unified deployment setting.