Paper Detail

DARAD: Dual Adapters and Ranking-Aware Distillation for Continual Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval

Xi Chen, Xu Chen, Xiangyang Jia, Wei Wang, Xu Zhang, Zhenyuan Sun

arxiv Score 12.4

Published 2026-08-06 · First seen 2026-08-07

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

With the rapid growth of Earth observation technologies, remote sensing archives are rapidly expanding, making remote sensing image-text retrieval (RS-ITR) increasingly important. However, continual RS-ITR remains challenging because scale variation and distribution shifts in RS aggravate cross-modal alignment space distortion, making it difficult for existing continual learning (CL) methods to support reliable continual retrieval. To address this challenge, we propose DARAD, a dual-adapter and ranking-aware distillation framework that preserves the historical cross-modal ranking structure while learning new visual and textual concepts from evolving archives. Specifically, the visual branch introduces a spatial fusion adapter, which integrates coarse regional cues and fine-grained patch cues to accommodate RS scale variation while anchoring visual updates to the pretrained alignment space. The textual branch employs multi-expert semantic routing, which separates shared textual semantics from semantically specialized residuals to absorb newly emerging descriptions while constraining global text embedding drift. Furthermore, bidirectional ranking distillation uses a frozen teacher model and historical anchors to preserve the historical cross-modal ranking structure, thereby mitigating alignment space distortion across continual stages. Experiments under a multi-stage continual retrieval protocol show that DARAD achieves superior performance over existing CL methods, improving adaptation to newly arrived data while maintaining effectiveness on historical data.

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BibTeX

@article{chen2026darad,
  title = {DARAD: Dual Adapters and Ranking-Aware Distillation for Continual Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval},
  author = {Xi Chen and Xu Chen and Xiangyang Jia and Wei Wang and Xu Zhang and Zhenyuan Sun},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {With the rapid growth of Earth observation technologies, remote sensing archives are rapidly expanding, making remote sensing image-text retrieval (RS-ITR) increasingly important. However, continual RS-ITR remains challenging because scale variation and distribution shifts in RS aggravate cross-modal alignment space distortion, making it difficult for existing continual learning (CL) methods to support reliable continual retrieval. To address this challenge, we propose DARAD, a dual-adapter and },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06059},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2608.06059},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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