# Parameter-Efficient Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation With Stage-Wise Shared Adapters

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18571 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18571/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [The RSNA-ASNR-MICCAI BraTS 2021 Benchmark on Brain Tumor Segmentation and Radiogenomic Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02314/) (2021)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [HeMIS: Hetero-Modal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.05194/) (2016)
- [mmFormer: Multimodal Medical Transformer for Incomplete Multimodal Learning of Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02425/) (2022)
- [Robust Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation via Feature Disentanglement and Gated Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09708/) (2020)
- [NestedFormer: Nested Modality-Aware Transformer for Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14876/) (2022)
- [The Fully Convolutional Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00566/) (2022)
- [How we won BraTS 2023 Adult Glioma challenge? Just faking it! Enhanced Synthetic Data Augmentation and Model Ensemble for brain tumour segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17317/) (2024)
- [RePre: Improving Self-Supervised Vision Transformer with Reconstructive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06857/) (2022)
- [Advanced Tumor Segmentation in Medical Imaging: An Ensemble Approach for BraTS 2023 Adult Glioma and Pediatric Tumor Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09262/) (2024)
- [Cross-modality Attention Adapter: A Glioma Segmentation Fine-tuning Method for SAM Using Multimodal Brain MR Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01124/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Different MRI modalities reveal different parts of a brain tumor. Segmentation models combine information from these modalities to outline tumor regions. Many models use a separate encoder for each modality. However, exchanging features among these encoders at several stages can increase model complexity. We introduce the Block-Wise Shared Adapter (BWSA), which combines compressed features from the modality encoders in a shared path and returns adapted features to each stream. In its fixed-blending form, BWSA adds the adapted features to the original features. Its trainable-gated variant (TG-BWSA) instead learns separate weights for the original and adapted features at each modality and encoder stage. We evaluate both variants on BraTS 2020 and BraTS 2023 with four segmentation backbones. On the official BraTS 2023 online validation set, BWSA increases average region-wise Dice by 1.3--7.6 percentage points relative to the corresponding unmodified backbones. TG-BWSA increases it by 2.8--7.7 points. Both variants add approximately 0.85--3.73% parameters and reduce average HD95 relative to the unmodified backbones.