CVAug 3, 2025

SpectralX: Parameter-efficient Domain Generalization for Spectral Remote Sensing Foundation Models

arXiv:2508.01731v116 citationsh-index: 31
Originality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

This work addresses a domain-specific problem for remote sensing researchers and practitioners by enabling more efficient adaptation of foundation models to spectral imagery, though it is incremental as it builds on existing RSFM methods.

The paper tackles the lack of foundation models for multispectral/hyperspectral remote sensing data by proposing SpectralX, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework that adapts existing optical RSFMs to handle diverse spectral inputs, achieving significant improvements in domain generalization performance for semantic segmentation tasks.

Recent advances in Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs) have led to significant breakthroughs in the field. While many RSFMs have been pretrained with massive optical imagery, more multispectral/hyperspectral data remain lack of the corresponding foundation models. To leverage the advantages of spectral imagery in earth observation, we explore whether existing RSFMs can be effectively adapted to process diverse spectral modalities without requiring extensive spectral pretraining. In response to this challenge, we proposed SpectralX, an innovative parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework that adapt existing RSFMs as backbone while introducing a two-stage training approach to handle various spectral inputs, thereby significantly improving domain generalization performance. In the first stage, we employ a masked-reconstruction task and design a specialized Hyper Tokenizer (HyperT) to extract attribute tokens from both spatial and spectral dimensions. Simultaneously, we develop an Attribute-oriented Mixture of Adapter (AoMoA) that dynamically aggregates multi-attribute expert knowledge while performing layer-wise fine-tuning. With semantic segmentation as downstream task in the second stage, we insert an Attribute-refined Adapter (Are-adapter) into the first stage framework. By iteratively querying low-level semantic features with high-level representations, the model learns to focus on task-beneficial attributes, enabling customized adjustment of RSFMs. Following this two-phase adaptation process, SpectralX is capable of interpreting spectral imagery from new regions or seasons. The codes will be available from the website: https://github.com/YuxiangZhang-BIT.

Foundations

The foundational work for this paper's niche, ranked by how specifically the neighbourhood builds on it — not by global fame.

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