DIS2: Disentanglement Meets Distillation with Classwise Attention for Robust Remote Sensing Segmentation under Missing Modalities
This addresses the challenge of robust segmentation in remote sensing for applications like environmental monitoring, but it is incremental as it builds on existing disentanglement and distillation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of missing modalities in remote sensing segmentation, which undermines multimodal learning due to heterogeneous data and scale variation, and proposes DIS2, a method that compensates for missing information and achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods on benchmarks.
The efficacy of multimodal learning in remote sensing (RS) is severely undermined by missing modalities. The challenge is exacerbated by the RS highly heterogeneous data and huge scale variation. Consequently, paradigms proven effective in other domains often fail when confronted with these unique data characteristics. Conventional disentanglement learning, which relies on significant feature overlap between modalities (modality-invariant), is insufficient for this heterogeneity. Similarly, knowledge distillation becomes an ill-posed mimicry task where a student fails to focus on the necessary compensatory knowledge, leaving the semantic gap unaddressed. Our work is therefore built upon three pillars uniquely designed for RS: (1) principled missing information compensation, (2) class-specific modality contribution, and (3) multi-resolution feature importance. We propose a novel method DIS2, a new paradigm shifting from modality-shared feature dependence and untargeted imitation to active, guided missing features compensation. Its core novelty lies in a reformulated synergy between disentanglement learning and knowledge distillation, termed DLKD. Compensatory features are explicitly captured which, when fused with the features of the available modality, approximate the ideal fused representation of the full-modality case. To address the class-specific challenge, our Classwise Feature Learning Module (CFLM) adaptively learn discriminative evidence for each target depending on signal availability. Both DLKD and CFLM are supported by a hierarchical hybrid fusion (HF) structure using features across resolutions to strengthen prediction. Extensive experiments validate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across benchmarks.