DARN: Dynamic Adaptive Regularization Networks for Efficient and Robust Foundation Model Adaptation

Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) offer powerful representations for geospatial analysis, but adapting them effectively remains challenging. Standard adaptation methods, whether full fine-tuning or efficient frozen-backbone approaches, typically employ decoders with fixed regularization strategies, failing to account for the significant heterogeneity in satellite imagery. We introduce Dynamic Adaptive Regularization Networks (DARN), a novel decoder architecture designed to address this limitation. DARN integrates three key innovations: (1) a lightweight Task Complexity Predictor (TCP) that estimates per-sample difficulty, (2) Adaptive Dropout Modulation (ADM), dynamically adjusting dropout rates (from 0.1 to 0.5) based on predicted complexity, and (3) Dynamic Capacity Gating (DCG) that modulates channel activation. We provide theoretical justifications linking DARN's optimization to stationary point convergence and its mechanism to adaptive information bottlenecks. Empirically, DARN demonstrates exceptional performance across both major adaptation paradigms. In full fine-tuning (unfrozen backbone), DARN achieves a new state-of-the-art on the multi-task GeoBench benchmark (86.66% mIoU, +5.56 pp over prior SOTA). In efficient adaptation (frozen backbone), DARN achieves SOTA-competitive accuracy (90.5% mIoU on Sen1Floods11) while delivering substantial advantages crucial for real-world deployment: superior out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization (+9.5 pp mIoU on AI4SmallFarms), enhanced robustness (17% relative reduction in corruption error), and improved performance on minority classes. DARN offers a more intelligent, robust, and efficient approach to leveraging FMs in critical geospatial applications.