# SGMA: Semantic-Guided Modality-Aware Segmentation for Remote Sensing with Incomplete Multimodal Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02505 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02505/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15826/) (2023)
- [RSGPT: A Remote Sensing Vision Language Model and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15266/) (2023)
- [More Diverse Means Better: Multimodal Deep Learning Meets Remote Sensing Imagery Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05457/) (2020)
- [Delivering Arbitrary-Modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01480/) (2023)
- [Beyond RGB: Very High Resolution Urban Remote Sensing With Multimodal Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08681/) (2017)
- [Cross-City Matters: A Multimodal Remote Sensing Benchmark Dataset for Cross-City Semantic Segmentation using High-Resolution Domain Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16499/) (2023)
- [EarthVQA: Towards Queryable Earth via Relational Reasoning-Based Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12222/) (2023)
- [Learnable Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation for Multi-modal Learning with Missing Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01035/) (2023)
- [Learning Modality-agnostic Representation for Semantic Segmentation from Any Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11351/) (2024)
- [Missing Modality Robustness in Semi-Supervised Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10756/) (2023)
- [Centering the Value of Every Modality: Towards Efficient and Resilient Modality-agnostic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11344/) (2024)
- [TFDet: Target-Aware Fusion for RGB-T Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16580/) (2023)
- [PASSION: Towards Effective Incomplete Multi-Modal Medical Image Segmentation with Imbalanced Missing Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14796/) (2024)
- [NWPU-MOC: A Benchmark for Fine-grained Multi-category Object Counting in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10530/) (2024)
- [RSAdapter: Adapting Multimodal Models for Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13120/) (2023)
- [Image Fusion in Remote Sensing: An Overview and Meta Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08837/) (2024)
- [Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation for Remote Sensing Images via Multi-scale Uncertainty Consistency and Cross-Teacher-Student Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10736/) (2025)
- [A Review of Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Probabilistic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16370/) (2024)
- [MultiMAE Meets Earth Observation: Pre-training Multi-modal Multi-task Masked Autoencoders for Earth Observation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14951/) (2025)
- [SDM-Car: A Dataset for Small and Dim Moving Vehicles Detection in Satellite Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18214/) (2024)
- [CHARM: Collaborative Harmonization across Arbitrary Modalities for Modality-agnostic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03060/) (2025)
- [DeTracker: Motion-decoupled Vehicle Detection and Tracking in Unstabilized Satellite Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09240/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Observe Less, Understand More: Cost-aware Cross-scale Observation for Remote Sensing Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11415/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal semantic segmentation integrates complementary information from diverse sensors for remote sensing Earth observation. However, practical systems often encounter missing modalities due to sensor failures or incomplete coverage, termed Incomplete Multimodal Semantic Segmentation (IMSS). IMSS faces three key challenges: (1) multimodal imbalance, where dominant modalities suppress fragile ones; (2) intra-class variation in scale, shape, and orientation across modalities; and (3) cross-modal heterogeneity with conflicting cues producing inconsistent semantic responses. Existing methods rely on contrastive learning or joint optimization, which risk over-alignment, discarding modality-specific cues or imbalanced training, favoring robust modalities, while largely overlooking intra-class variation and cross-modal heterogeneity. To address these limitations, we propose the Semantic-Guided Modality-Aware (SGMA) framework, which ensures balanced multimodal learning while reducing intra-class variation and reconciling cross-modal inconsistencies through semantic guidance. SGMA introduces two complementary plug-and-play modules: (1) Semantic-Guided Fusion (SGF) module extracts multi-scale, class-wise semantic prototypes that capture consistent categorical representations across modalities, estimates per-modality robustness based on prototype-feature alignment, and performs adaptive fusion weighted by robustness scores to mitigate intra-class variation and cross-modal heterogeneity; (2) Modality-Aware Sampling (MAS) module leverages robustness estimations from SGF to dynamically reweight training samples, prioritizing challenging samples from fragile modalities to address modality imbalance. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and backbones demonstrate that SGMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with particularly significant improvements in fragile modalities.
