UNIV: Unified Foundation Model for Infrared and Visible Modalities

Abstract

Joint RGB-infrared perception is essential for achieving robustness under diverse weather and illumination conditions. Although foundation models excel within single modalities, they suffer from substantial cross-modal degradation, an issue we attribute to a pattern shortcut, i.e., a modal bias that prioritizes superficial sensor patterns over underlying semantics. To address this problem, we introduce UNIV, a Unified foundation model for Infrared and Visible modalities. At the core of UNIV lies Patch Cross-modal Contrastive Learning (PCCL), a self-supervised contrastive learning strategy that constructs a unified cross-modal feature space. PCCL employs a frozen pre-trained model to sample pseudo patch pairs based on semantic similarity, and aligns infrared-visible representations by attracting semantically related pairs while repelling unrelated ones. This process simultaneously enhances cross-modal alignment and inter-class semantic separability, guiding the model to focus on semantic structure rather than falling into pattern shortcuts. To further enable cross-modal learning, we introduce MVIP, the most comprehensive visible-infrared benchmark to date, containing 98,992 precisely aligned image pairs across diverse scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate UNIV's superior performance on infrared tasks (+1.7 mIoU for semantic segmentation and +0.7 mAP for detection), while maintaining competitive accuracy on RGB tasks.