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

Abstract: 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.