# UNIV: Unified Foundation Model for Infrared and Visible Modalities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15642 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15642/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16220/) (2022)
- [X-CLIP: End-to-End Multi-grained Contrastive Learning for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07285/) (2022)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02437/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Masked Autoencoders are Stronger Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13532/) (2022)
- [ConvMAE: Masked Convolution Meets Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03892/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Action Retrieval Through Multiple Parts-of-Speech Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03477/) (2019)
- [LasHeR: A Large-scale High-diversity Benchmark for RGBT Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13202/) (2021)
- [HiTeA: Hierarchical Temporal-Aware Video-Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14546/) (2022)
- [Self-EMD: Self-Supervised Object Detection without ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13677/) (2020)
- [MILAN: Masked Image Pretraining on Language Assisted Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06049/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Joint RGB-infrared perception is essential for achieving robustness under diverse weather and illumination conditions. Although foundation models excel within single modalities, they suffer from substantial cross-modal degradation, an issue we attribute to a pattern shortcut, i.e., a modal bias that prioritizes superficial sensor patterns over underlying semantics. To address this problem, we introduce UNIV, a Unified foundation model for Infrared and Visible modalities. At the core of UNIV lies Patch Cross-modal Contrastive Learning (PCCL), a self-supervised contrastive learning strategy that constructs a unified cross-modal feature space. PCCL employs a frozen pre-trained model to sample pseudo patch pairs based on semantic similarity, and aligns infrared-visible representations by attracting semantically related pairs while repelling unrelated ones. This process simultaneously enhances cross-modal alignment and inter-class semantic separability, guiding the model to focus on semantic structure rather than falling into pattern shortcuts. To further enable cross-modal learning, we introduce MVIP, the most comprehensive visible-infrared benchmark to date, containing 98,992 precisely aligned image pairs across diverse scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate UNIV's superior performance on infrared tasks (+1.7 mIoU for semantic segmentation and +0.7 mAP for detection), while maintaining competitive accuracy on RGB tasks.