# Centering the Value of Every Modality: Towards Efficient and Resilient Modality-agnostic Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11344 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11344/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 82 of its 115 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09224/) (2021)
- [Deep Multi-modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07830/) (2019)
- [Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08904/) (2018)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [DeepFusion: Lidar-Camera Deep Fusion for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08195/) (2022)
- [Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05740/) (2019)
- [2DPASS: 2D Priors Assisted Semantic Segmentation on LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04397/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [Multi-class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02891/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Token Fusion for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08721/) (2022)
- [MMTM: Multimodal Transfer Module for CNN Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08670/) (2019)
- [Context Prior for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01547/) (2020)
- [Deep Multimodal Fusion by Channel Exchanging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05005/) (2020)
- [Delivering Arbitrary-Modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01480/) (2023)
- [Strip Pooling: Rethinking Spatial Pooling for Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13328/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [MLLMs are Deeply Affected by Modality Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18657/) (2025)
- [CAFuser: Condition-Aware Multimodal Fusion for Robust Semantic Perception of Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10791/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Multi-modal Semantic Segmentation under Sensor Failures: Missing and Noisy Modality Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18445/) (2025)
- [Customize Segment Anything Model for Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation with Mixture of LoRA Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04220/) (2024)
- [MAGIC++: Efficient and Resilient Modality-Agnostic Semantic Segmentation via Hierarchical Modality Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16876/) (2024)
- [Learning Robust Anymodal Segmentor with Unimodal and Cross-modal Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17141/) (2024)
- [MemorySAM: Memorize Modalities and Semantics with Segment Anything Model 2 for Multi-modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06700/) (2025)
- [Reducing Unimodal Bias in Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation with Multi-Scale Functional Entropy Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06635/) (2025)
- [DGFusion: Depth-Guided Sensor Fusion for Robust Semantic Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09828/) (2025)
- [Split Matching for Inductive Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05023/) (2025)
- [CHARM: Collaborative Harmonization across Arbitrary Modalities for Modality-agnostic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03060/) (2025)
- [EGFormer: Towards Efficient and Generalizable Multimodal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14014/) (2025)
- [SGMA: Semantic-Guided Modality-Aware Segmentation for Remote Sensing with Incomplete Multimodal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02505/) (2026)
- [GeomPrompt: Geometric Prompt Learning for RGB-D Semantic Segmentation Under Missing and Degraded Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11585/) (2026)
- [RMMSS: Towards Advanced Robust Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation with Hybrid Prototype Distillation and Feature Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12861/) (2025)
- [BiXFormer: A Robust Framework for Maximizing Modality Effectiveness in Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03675/) (2025)
- [Partial CLIP is Enough: Chimera-Seg for Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22032/) (2025)
- [Robust Multimodal Semantic Segmentation with Balanced Modality Contributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24505/) (2025)
- [SegRGB-X: General RGB-X Semantic Segmentation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28023/) (2026)
- [CrossWeaver: Cross-modal Weaving for Arbitrary-Modality Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02948/) (2026)
- [UMSS: Towards Unsupervised Multi-modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12372/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Fusion of RGB and Complementary Modalities for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17800/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fusing an arbitrary number of modalities is vital for achieving robust multi-modal fusion of semantic segmentation yet remains less explored to date. Recent endeavors regard RGB modality as the center and the others as the auxiliary, yielding an asymmetric architecture with two branches. However, the RGB modality may struggle in certain circumstances, e.g., nighttime, while others, e.g., event data, own their merits; thus, it is imperative for the fusion model to discern robust and fragile modalities, and incorporate the most robust and fragile ones to learn a resilient multi-modal framework. To this end, we propose a novel method, named MAGIC, that can be flexibly paired with various backbones, ranging from compact to high-performance models. Our method comprises two key plug-and-play modules. Firstly, we introduce a multi-modal aggregation module to efficiently process features from multi-modal batches and extract complementary scene information. On top, a unified arbitrary-modal selection module is proposed to utilize the aggregated features as the benchmark to rank the multi-modal features based on the similarity scores. This way, our method can eliminate the dependence on RGB modality and better overcome sensor failures while ensuring the segmentation performance. Under the commonly considered multi-modal setting, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing the model parameters by 60%. Moreover, our method is superior in the novel modality-agnostic setting, where it outperforms prior arts by a large margin of +19.41% mIoU
