MsRE: Toward Efficient Remote Sensing Segmentation via Vision Foundation Models

Abstract

Vision foundation models (VFMs) pretrained on large-scale datasets have significantly improved performance in remote sensing semantic segmentation. However, existing methods typically rely on full fine-tuning, which requires updating all model parameters. Instead of updating the full parameter set, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) achieves competitive performance by optimizing only a small subset of parameters. Despite its success, most existing PEFT methods are mainly designed for natural image tasks and fail to account for the unique multiscale characteristics of remote sensing images. To address these challenges, we propose multi-scale cognitive feature refinement (MsRE) tuning, a novel PEFT method tailored for remote sensing semantic segmentation. In particular, MsRE captures multiscale contextual information by applying cognitive operations with different cognitive fields to intermediate features of the backbone. It then introduces a set of learnable tokens to establish interactions with features at different scales, enabling precise feature refinement and progressive feature propagation across network layers. This mechanism enhances the model’s ability to understand complex remote sensing scenes and improves downstream segmentation performance. With significantly fewer trainable parameters, MsRE provides an efficient yet effective solution for adapting VFMs to remote sensing segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MsRE achieves competitive segmentation performance with substantially fewer trainable backbone parameters, providing a favorable balance between accuracy and parameter efficiency. The project is available at http://woldier.top/MsRE