Domain generalised semantic segmentation (DGSS) has recently benefited from combining multiple foundation models, such as vision-language and vision foundation models, to leverage their diverse representations for generalisation. Existing multi-model approaches share a common design choice: cross-model fusion is restricted to depth-aligned layers, implicitly assuming that mutually beneficial information resides at the same depth across models. However, foundation models pretrained under different objectives may develop distinct representation hierarchies, making the optimality of depth-aligned fusion questionable. Moreover, we observe that the foundation models exhibit different depth-wise domain sensitivity. Motivated by these observations, we propose a Sparse All-Layer Connector (SALC) that enables each layer to access information from preceding layers of another model. As the number of accessible layers grows with depth, dense aggregation may hurt generalisation. SALC therefore learns to adaptively select a sparse subset of informative layers. We further introduce a candidate dropout regularisation that strengthens sparsity and encourages SALC to explore diverse layers, leading to more robust selection. Across four foundation model combinations and three DGSS evaluation settings, the proposed design demonstrates stronger generalisation than conventional depth-aligned fusion. The code is available at https://github.com/RuoyuGuo/SALC.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: (a) The model is trained on GTAV and evaluated on Cityscapes, BDD100K, and Mapillary. The random pairing is sampled independently for DINOv2 and CLIP using over 40 seeds. (b) Layer-wise cross-domain behaviour measured by MMD. We report the average pairwise MMD over all six domain pairs of the four domains. (c) Architecture of our sparse all-layer fusion.
Figure 2: (a) Two models extract features from the same image in parallel. SALC fuses multi-layer features from one model into the other. The final segmentation map is predicted using multi-scale features of two models. (b) SALC selectively fuses features from all candidate layers, controlled by a learnable sparsity factor. We also propose a dropout regularisation to improve robustness.
Method
Backbone
Trained on GTAV (G)
Trained on SYNTHIA (S)
Trained on Cityscapes (C)
→ C
→ B
→ M
Avg.
→ C
→ B
→ M
Avg.
→ B
→ M
Avg.
Classic DGSS
SAN-SAW Peng et al. (2022)
ResNet-101
45.33
41.18
40.77
42.43
40.87
35.98
37.26
38.04
54.73
61.27
58.00
AdvStyle Zhong et al. (2022)
ResNet-101
39.52
36.39
36.10
37.34
37.59
27.45
31.76
32.27
–
–
–
CMFormer Bi et al. (2024b)
Swin-L
55.31
49.91
60.09
55.10
44.59
33.44
43.25
40.43
59.27
71.10
65.19
Single foundation model
Table 1: Comparison with SOTA. * denotes re-implementation with official code. Bold and underline denote the best and second-best. Depth denotes DepthAnythingV2.
Figure 3: Layer selection statistics of SALC across domains (G, C, B, M).
Figure 5
Figure 6: Active layers and cross-domain standard deviation before and after dropout.
Figure 7: Qualitative comparison with Rein Wei et al. (2024) and MFuser Zhang and Tan (2025) under the G → {C, B, M} setting.
Table 8
Variant
→ C
→ B
→ M
Avg.
No fusion
69.23
58.83
69.22
65.76
Depth-aligned
70.17
60.96
71.38
67.50
Cross-depth attention
71.85
60.25
72.37
68.16
Cross-depth Top2 routing
71.66
59.91
71.73
67.77
SALC
72.37
62.31
73.52
69.40
Table 4: Comparison of fusion strategies.
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Method
Ours
Vireo Chen et al. (2025b)
DepthForge Chen et al. (2025c)
MFuser Zhang and Tan (2025)
Rein Wei et al. (2024)
FADA Bi et al. (2024a)
SoMA Yun et al. (2025)
Trainable params (M)
9.59
3.78
2.99
141.79
2.99
11.65
4.9
Appendix
Table 5: Comparison of parameter counts across different methods.
Hyperparameter
MFuser-based
DepthForge-based
Encoder configurations
EA
DINOv2/SAM
DINOv2
EB
CLIP / SigLIP
DepthAnythingV2
Decoder
Mask2Former
Mask2Former
Training
Optimizer
AdamW
AdamW
Appendix
Table 6: Implementation details of SALC integrated into the MFuser Zhang and Tan (2025) and DepthForge Chen et al. (2025c) frameworks. We follow the original training settings of each framework unless otherwise specified. SALC-specific hyperparameters are shared across both configurations.
Variant
DINOv2-CLIP
DINOv2-SigLIP
→ C
→ B
→ M
Avg.
→ C
→ B
→ M
Avg.
No dropout
71.81 ± 0.52
61.47 ± 0.34
73.41 ± 0.50
68.90 ± 0.12
72.46 ± 0.04
61.85 ± 0.23
72.55 ± 0.15
68.95 ± 0.14
Uniform dropout
72.01 ± 0.76
61.23 ± 0.95
73.20 ± 1.05
68.81 ± 0.89
71.89 ± 0.55
61.53 ± 0.06
73.00 ± 0.37
68.81 ± 0.30
Frequency-based dropout (Ours)
72.03 ± 0.36
62.39 ± 0.40
73.44 ± 0.08
69.29 ± 0.11
72.46 ± 0.35
62.27 ± 0.24
72.95 ± 0.16
69.23 ± 0.07
Appendix
Table 7: Ablation study of dropout strategies under different backbone combinations on the G → {C, B, M} setting.
Figure 8: Layer selection statistics of SALC across domains (G, C, B, M) for DINOv2-SigLIP.
Figure 14
Figure 11: Active layers and cross-domain standard deviation before and after dropout for DINOv2-SigLIP.
Figure 12: Cross-model layer-wise CKA between CLIP and different vision foundation models.
Variant
→ C
→ B
→ M
Avg.
EMA
w/o EMA
72.18
61.71
73.05
68.98
RMSNorm
w/o RMSNorm
72.05
61.81
73.38
69.08
Penalty sharpness γ
γ=1
71.69
61.97
73.52
69.06
Appendix
Table 8: Ablation studies on EMA, RMSNorm, and γ using DINOv2-CLIP under the G → {C, B, M} setting. SALC uses EMA, RMSNorm and γ=2 .
Domain Generalization Semantic Segmentation (DGSS) focuses on generalizing knowledge from labeled source domains to unseen target domains where data is unavailable during the training phase. While conventional methods utilize style randomization or feature normalization to mitigate domain shifts, they often impair feature integrity. Specifically, style randomization distorts the underlying feature manifold due to its coarse-grained nature, while feature normalization suppresses discriminative, domain-sensitive semantic details owing to its rigid design. To address these limitations, we propose the Language-and-Source-Anchored Alignment (LASA) framework, which comprises three synergistic components: Text-and-Source-Guided Style Transfer (TSGST), Domain-Aware Query Adapter (DAQA), and Domain-Aware Decoder Optimizer (DADO). Concretely, the TSGST module addresses manifold distortion by utilizing source features as structural anchors and vision-language model (VLM) priors as fine-grained guidance. To restore suppressed discriminative and domain-sensitive details, the DAQA module recalibrates object queries via categorical guidance and domain-aware signatures, while the DADO module aligns the resulting query distributions with a shared classifier to ensure consistent categorical responses across domains. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
Jinhong Zhu, Weiqi Yan, Shengchuan Zhang +1
Xiamen University · Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China · Xiamen, Fujian, China
Domain Generalization Semantic Segmentation (DGSS) in spectral remote sensing is severely challenged by spectral shifts across diverse acquisition conditions, which cause significant performance degradation for models deployed in unseen domains. While fine-tuning foundation models is a promising direction, existing methods employ global, homogeneous adjustments. This "one-size-fits-all" tuning struggles with the spatial heterogeneity of land cover, causing semantic confusion. We argue that the key to robust DGSS lies not in a single global adaptation, but in performing fine-grained, spatially-adaptive refinement of a foundation model's features. To achieve this, we propose SpectralMoE, a novel fine-tuning framework for DGSS. It operationalizes this principle by utilizing a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to perform local precise refinement on the foundation model's features, incorporating depth features estimated from selected RGB bands of the spectral remote sensing imagery to guide the fine-tuning process. Specifically, SpectralMoE employs a dual-gated MoE architecture that independently routes visual and depth features to top-k selected experts for specialized refinement, enabling modality-specific adjustments. A subsequent cross-attention mechanism then judiciously fuses the refined structural cues into the visual stream, mitigating semantic ambiguities caused by spectral variations. Extensive experiments show that SpectralMoE sets a new state-of-the-art on multiple DGSS benchmarks across hyperspectral, multispectral, and RGB remote sensing imagery.
Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation (DGSS) aims to maintain robust performance across unseen target domains. Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich multi-domain knowledge that can enhance generalization. However, strategies for actively exploiting the rich subspace structures within VFMs remain under-explored, with many existing methods focusing primarily on preserving pre-trained knowledge. Furthermore, their LoRA components often suffer from limited representational diversity and inefficient parameter utilization. We propose RecycleLoRA, which addresses both challenges by employing Rank-Revealing QR Decomposition (RRQR) to systematically exploit VFM's subspace structures and enhance LoRA's representational richness. Our main adapter leverages minor subspace directions identified by RRQR to learn diverse and independent features, achieving competitive performance even when used alone. We further introduce a sub adapter that carefully refines major directions with minimal adjustments, providing complementary improvements to the main adapter's strong baseline performance. This design enables the dual adapters to learn distinct representations without requiring additional regularization losses. Our systematic exploitation of pre-trained subspace structures through RRQR-based initialization leads to superior domain generalization performance. RecycleLoRA achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic-to-real generalization and real-to-real generalization tasks without complex architectures or additional inference latency.
Chanseul Cho, Seokju Yun, Jeaseong Jeon +2
Machine Intelligence Laboratory, University of Seoul, Korea