LESSViT: Robust Hyperspectral Representation Learning under Spectral Configuration Shift

TL;DR

This paper introduces LESSViT, a low-rank, sensor-flexible Vision Transformer architecture for hyperspectral imagery that improves cross-sensor generalization by efficiently modeling spatial-spectral interactions.

Contribution

The paper proposes LESSViT with LESS Attention and HyperMAE for robust, efficient hyperspectral representation learning across different sensors and spectral configurations.

Findings

LESSViT enhances robustness under spectral shifts on the SpectralEarth benchmark.

The low-rank factorization reduces computational complexity significantly.

Explicit spatial-spectral modeling is crucial for scalable hyperspectral learning.

Abstract

Modeling hyperspectral imagery (HSI) across different sensors presents a fundamental challenge due to variations in wavelength coverage, band sampling, and channel dimensionality. As a result, models trained under a fixed spectral configuration often fail to generalize to other sensors. Existing Vision Transformer (ViT) approaches either rely on implicit spectral modeling with fixed channel assumptions or adopt explicit spatial-spectral attention with prohibitive computational cost, leading to a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and expressiveness. In this work, we introduce Low-rank Efficient Spatial-Spectral ViT (LESSViT), a sensor-flexible architecture for cross-spectral generalization. LESSViT is built on LESS Attention, a structured low-rank factorization that models joint spatial-spectral interactions through separable spatial and spectral components, reducing the complexity of full spatial-spectral attention from $O(N^2 C^2)$ to $O(rNC)$, where $N$ is the number of spatial tokens, $C$ is the number of spectral channels, and $r$ is the rank of the low-rank approximation. We further incorporate channel-agnostic patch embedding and wavelength-aware positional encoding to support flexible spectral inputs. To enable efficient and robust pretraining, we introduce a hyperspectral masked autoencoder (HyperMAE) with decoupled spatial-spectral masking and hierarchical channel sampling. We evaluate LESSViT under a cross-spectral generalization setting that simulates cross-sensor variability. Experiments on the SpectralEarth benchmark demonstrate that LESSViT improves robustness under spectral shifts while remaining competitive in-distribution, and explicit and efficient spatial-spectral modeling is essential for scalable and generalizable hyperspectral representation learning.