Visual state-space models (SSMs) are increasingly promoted as efficient alternatives to Vision Transformers, yet their practical advantages remain unclear under fair comparison because existing studies rarely isolate encoder effects from decoder and training choices. We present a strictly controlled benchmark of representative visual SSM families, including VMamba, MambaVision, and Spatial-Mamba, for remote-sensing semantic segmentation, in which only the encoder varies across experiments. Evaluated on LoveDA and ISPRS Potsdam under a unified 4-stage feature interface and a fixed lightweight decoder, the benchmark reveals three main findings, intra-family scaling yields only modest gains, cross-domain generalization is strongly asymmetric, and boundary delineation is the dominant failure mode under distribution shift. Although visual SSMs achieve favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-offs relative to the controlled CNN and Transformer baselines considered here, the results suggest that future improvements are more likely to come from robustness-oriented design and boundary-aware decoding than from encoder scaling alone. By isolating encoder behavior under a unified and reproducible protocol, this study establishes a practical reference benchmark for the design and evaluation of future Mamba-based segmentation backbones
The computational complexity of Transformers scales quadratically with the number of tokens, which significantly constrains the efficiency of vision models, particularly recent ViT-based foundation models in dense prediction tasks. Instance segmentation, a typical dense visual prediction task in the remote sensing field, faces similar challenges. In this paper, inspired by the recent advances of knowledge distillation in large language models, we introduce RS4D - a new remote sensing instance segmentation method with linear computational complexity, which addresses the inefficiency of long sequence modeling through distilled state space modeling (SSM). We propose an adaptive noise and masking knowledge distillation training method for pre-training lightweight SSM backbones, which effectively compresses knowledge from the vast self-attention space into a compact, dense linear state space. We also design a remote sensing image instance segmentation architecture based on this lightweight visual encoder, where we explore variants of three different backbones and two segmentation heads. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple benchmark datasets, including SSDD, WHU, and NWPU. Compared to ViT-based approaches, our proposed SSM backbone achieves an 8x reduction in parameters and a 9x reduction in FLOPs while maintaining comparable or superior accuracy to both ViT- and CNN-based instance segmentation methods. The implementation codes have been publicly available at https://github.com/QinzheYang/RS4D.
State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as a powerful and efficient alternative to Transformers, demonstrating linear-time complexity and exceptional sequence modeling capabilities. However, their application to vision tasks remains challenging. First, existing vision SSMs largely depend on manually designed fixed scanning methods to flatten image patches into sequences, which imposes predefined geometric structures and increases the complexity. Second, the broader adoption of vision SSMs is hindered in domains that require query-based interactions between distinct information streams. This is a result of the inherently causal and self-referential nature of SSMs designed for 1D sequence modeling tasks. This fusion mechanism is indispensable for critical perception tasks such as multi-view 3D fusion. To address these limitations, we propose Deformba, a context adaptive method that dynamically augments the spatial structural information while maintaining the linear complexity of SSMs. Deformba also allows multi-modal fusion like cross attention. To demonstrate the effectiveness and general applicability of Deformba, we test its performance on general 2D vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and segmentation, as well as 3D vision tasks like BEV perception. Extensive experiments show that Deformba achieves strong performance across various visual perception benchmarks.
State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an alternative to Vision Transformers, yet most vision SSMs inherit directional token scanning from causal sequence modeling. While effective for sequential data, directional scanning introduces spatial bias and orientation-sensitive representations. We present Vision Non-Causal Trapezoidal Mamba (VNCT), a second-order non-causal vision SSM that enables all image tokens to interact in a single pass, eliminating direSctional scanning and achieving low single-image inference latency. VNCT exhibits more orientation-robust representations, showing reduced performance degradation under image rotations and flips, while improving Boundary IoU by up to 3.7 points, leading to more accurate boundary preservation and object localization. Across ImageNet-1K classification, COCO object detection and instance segmentation, and ADE20K semantic segmentation, VNCT consistently outperforms both directional-scanning vision SSMs and first-order non-causal SSMs. These results show that directional scanning is unnecessary for high-performance vision SSMs and that second-order non-causal state-space modeling offers a simple, efficient, and robust alternative for visual recognition.
Anvitha Ramachandran, Dhruv Parikh, Haoyang Fan +2