# Efficient Remote Sensing with Harmonized Transfer Learning and Modality Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18253 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18253/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [VATT: Transformers for Multimodal Self-Supervised Learning from Raw Video, Audio and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11178/) (2021)
- [Exploring Models and Data for Remote Sensing Image Caption Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07835/) (2017)
- [UniT: Multimodal Multitask Learning with a Unified Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10772/) (2021)
- [UniPELT: A Unified Framework for Parameter-Efficient Language Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07577/) (2021)
- [Convolutional Bypasses Are Better Vision Transformer Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07039/) (2022)
- [Remote Sensing Cross-Modal Text-Image Retrieval Based on Global and Local Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09860/) (2022)
- [UniAdapter: Unified Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Cross-modal Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06605/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Adapter for Vision-Language Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09623/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12509/) (2023)
- [Direction-Oriented Visual-semantic Embedding Model for Remote Sensing Image-text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08276/) (2023)
- [USER: Unified Semantic Enhancement with Momentum Contrast for Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06844/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [PMPGuard: Catching Pseudo-Matched Pairs in Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18660/) (2025)
- [Multi-Perspective Subimage CLIP with Keyword Guidance for Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18190/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rise of Visual and Language Pretraining (VLP), an increasing number of downstream tasks are adopting the paradigm of pretraining followed by fine-tuning. Although this paradigm has demonstrated potential in various multimodal downstream tasks, its implementation in the remote sensing domain encounters some obstacles. Specifically, the tendency for same-modality embeddings to cluster together impedes efficient transfer learning. To tackle this issue, we review the aim of multimodal transfer learning for downstream tasks from a unified perspective, and rethink the optimization process based on three distinct objectives. We propose "Harmonized Transfer Learning and Modality Alignment (HarMA)", a method that simultaneously satisfies task constraints, modality alignment, and single-modality uniform alignment, while minimizing training overhead through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Remarkably, without the need for external data for training, HarMA achieves state-of-the-art performance in two popular multimodal retrieval tasks in the field of remote sensing. Our experiments reveal that HarMA achieves competitive and even superior performance to fully fine-tuned models with only minimal adjustable parameters. Due to its simplicity, HarMA can be integrated into almost all existing multimodal pretraining models. We hope this method can facilitate the efficient application of large models to a wide range of downstream tasks while significantly reducing the resource consumption. Code is available at https://github.com/seekerhuang/HarMA.