cs.CVOct 15, 2026

FuseAdapt: Parameter-Efficient Multimodal Fusion for Semantic Segmentation with Missing Modalities

Authors: Xin Zhang, Robby T. Tan

Organizations: National University of Singapore

Abstract

Multi-modal semantic segmentation benefits from complementary sensors, but this benefit is fragile when some modalities are degraded or missing at test time. Many existing methods rely on dedicated fusion modules or multi-branch cross-modal encoders, and the fusion often becomes unreliable when modalities are absent, leading to substantial performance drops. We propose FuseAdapt, a parameter-efficient framework that performs fusion within the adaptation space of a frozen vision foundation model (VFM), exploring whether VFM priors can serve as an effective shared backbone for multi-modal segmentation. Instead of attaching a standalone fusion network, FuseAdapt assigns each modality a lightweight adaptation branch and performs adaptation-space fusion by keeping Q/V low-rank adaptation private to each modality and routing only FFN low-rank residual activations across modalities inside the frozen backbone. The pretrained VFM remains fixed while modality-specific corrections and explicit cross-modal interaction are learned through the adaptation paths. To handle missing modalities, we further introduce Predictive Modality Modeling (PMM), a direct representation-level objective for cross-modal redundancy. During training, PMM masks a target modality and predicts its embedding from the visible ones, supervised by a teacher target computed under full-modality input. PMM is used only during training and adds no inference-time overhead. Across three multi-modal segmentation benchmarks (MCubeS, DELIVER, MUSES), FuseAdapt consistently improves both modality-complete and modality-incomplete segmentation with a small trainable budget, yielding up to +3.01 mIoU under full modalities and +12.56 mIoU under missing modalities over prior state-of-the-art. Project page: https://devinxzhang.github.io/FuseAdapt-Page/.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables11 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Mar 18, 2026

Parameter-Efficient Modality-Balanced Symmetric Fusion for Multimodal Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

Multimodal remote sensing semantic segmentation enhances scene interpretation by exploiting complementary physical cues from heterogeneous data. Although pretrained Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) provide strong general-purpose representations, adapting them to multimodal tasks often incurs substantial computational overhead and is prone to modality imbalance, where the contribution of auxiliary modalities is suppressed during optimization. To address these challenges, we propose MoBaNet, a parameter-efficient and modality-balanced symmetric fusion framework. Built upon a largely frozen VFM backbone, MoBaNet adopts a symmetric dual-stream architecture to preserve generalizable representations while minimizing the number of trainable parameters. Specifically, we design a Cross-modal Prompt-Injected Adapter (CPIA) to enable deep semantic interaction by generating shared prompts and injecting them into bottleneck adapters under the frozen backbone. To obtain compact and discriminative multimodal representations for decoding, we further introduce a Difference-Guided Gated Fusion Module (DGFM), which adaptively fuses paired stage features by explicitly leveraging cross-modal discrepancy to guide feature selection. Furthermore, we propose a Modality-Conditional Random Masking (MCRM) strategy to mitigate modality imbalance by masking one modality only during training and imposing hard-pixel auxiliary supervision on modality-specific branches. Extensive experiments on the ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam benchmarks demonstrate that MoBaNet achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly fewer trainable parameters than full fine-tuning, validating its effectiveness for robust and balanced multimodal fusion. The source code in this work is available at https://github.com/sauryeo/MoBaNet.
Apr 3, 2026

CrossWeaver: Cross-modal Weaving for Arbitrary-Modality Semantic Segmentation

Multimodal semantic segmentation has shown great potential in leveraging complementary information across diverse sensing modalities. However, existing approaches often rely on carefully designed fusion strategies that either use modality-specific adaptations or rely on loosely coupled interactions, thereby limiting flexibility and resulting in less effective cross-modal coordination. Moreover, these methods often struggle to balance efficient information exchange with preserving the unique characteristics of each modality across different modality combinations. To address these challenges, we propose CrossWeaver, a simple yet effective multimodal fusion framework for arbitrary-modality semantic segmentation. Its core is a Modality Interaction Block (MIB), which enables selective and reliability-aware cross-modal interaction within the encoder, while a lightweight Seam-Aligned Fusion (SAF) module further aggregates the enhanced features. Extensive experiments on multiple multimodal semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance with minimal additional parameters and strong generalization to unseen modality combinations.
Oct 13, 2026

Multimodal Fusion of RGB and Complementary Modalities for Semantic Segmentation

Multi-modal semantic segmentation adds an auxiliary sensing stream to RGB images (RGB-X), such as thermal, LiDAR, depth, event, polarization, or light field. This can improve robustness in poor lighting and under motion blur. But different sensors often produce features that do not match well, and fusion can become unstable. To alleviate these issues, we propose a bidirectional polarity-aware cross-modality fusion (BPCF) module that effectively captures complementary cues while enhancing feature alignment. We evaluate the framework on six modality pairings: RGB-Thermal, RGB-LiDAR, RGB-Depth, RGB-Event, RGB-Polarization, and RGB-Light Field. Our model achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on eight public datasets, including MFNet, KITTI-360, DELIVER, DDD17, DSEC, MCubeS, ZJU, and UrbanLF. The codes and trained models will be released upon acceptance.