SLGNet: Synergizing Structural Priors and Language-Guided Modulation for Multimodal Object Detection

Multimodal object detection leveraging RGB and Infrared (IR) images is pivotal for robust perception in all-weather scenarios. While recent adapter-based approaches efficiently transfer RGB-pretrained foundation models to this task, they often prioritize model efficiency at the expense of cross-modal structural consistency. Consequently, critical structural cues are frequently lost when significant domain gaps arise, such as in high-contrast or nighttime environments. Moreover, conventional static multimodal fusion mechanisms typically lack environmental awareness, resulting in suboptimal adaptation and constrained detection performance under complex, dynamic scene variations. To address these limitations, we propose SLGNet, a parameter-efficient framework that synergizes hierarchical structural priors and language-guided modulation within a frozen Vision Transformer (ViT)-based foundation model. Specifically, we design a Structure-Aware Adapter to extract hierarchical structural representations from both modalities and dynamically inject them into the ViT to compensate for structural degradation inherent in ViT-based backbones. Furthermore, we propose a Language-Guided Modulation module that exploits VLM-driven structured captions to dynamically recalibrate visual features, thereby endowing the model with robust environmental awareness. Extensive experiments on the LLVIP, FLIR, KAIST, and DroneVehicle datasets demonstrate that SLGNet establishes new state-of-the-art performance. Notably, on the LLVIP benchmark, our method achieves an mAP of 66.1, while reducing trainable parameters by approximately 87% compared to traditional full fine-tuning. This confirms SLGNet as a robust and efficient solution for multimodal perception.