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

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 +11.25 mIoU under missing modalities over prior state-of-the-art. Project page: https://devinxzhang.github.io/FuseAdapt-Page/