This study investigates the efficacy of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) in fine-tuning Earth Observation (EO) foundation models for flood segmentation. We hypothesize that LoRA, a parameter-efficient technique, can significantly accelerate the adaptation of large-scale EO models to this critical task while maintaining high performance. We apply LoRA to fine-tune a state-of-the-art EO foundation model pre-trained on diverse satellite imagery, using a curated dataset of flood events. Our results demonstrate that LoRA-based fine-tuning (r-256) improves F1 score by 6.66 points and IoU by 0.11 compared to a frozen encoder baseline, while significantly reducing computational costs. Notably, LoRA outperforms full fine-tuning, which proves computationally infeasible on our hardware. We further assess generalization through out-of-distribution (OOD) testing on a geographically distinct flood event. While LoRA configurations show improved OOD performance over the baseline. This work contributes to research on efficient adaptation of foundation models for specialized EO tasks, with implications for rapid response systems in disaster management. Our findings demonstrate LoRA's potential for enabling faster deployment of accurate flood segmentation models in resource-constrained, time-critical scenarios.
SIMPLER: Efficient Foundation Model Adaptation via Similarity-Guided Layer Pruning for Earth Observation
Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes (CiTIUS), Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain（智能技术研究中心（CiTIUS），圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉大学，西班牙）；Departmento de Electrónica e Computación, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain（电子与计算系，圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉大学，西班牙）；IBM Research Europe, Zurich, Switzerland（IBM欧洲研究院，瑞士苏黎世）
$Δ$-Patching: A Framework for Rapid Adaptation of Pre-trained Convolutional Networks without Base Performance Loss
Fujitsu Research India（富士通印度研究院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
User-Guided Domain Adaptation for Rapid Annotation from User Interactions: A Study on Pathological Liver Segmentation
PAII Inc.（PAII公司）；The University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）；University at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Chang Gung Memorial Hospital（长庚纪念医院）；PingAn Technology（平安科技）
Smart Transfer: Leveraging Vision Foundation Model for Rapid Building Damage Mapping with Post-Earthquake VHR Imagery
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学地理系）；Urban Governance and Design Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州）城市治理与设计学域）；School of Environment and Spatial Informatics, China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学环境与空间信息学院）；Disaster Management Institute, Istanbul Technical University（伊斯坦布尔技术大学灾害管理研究所）；Department of Complexity Science and Engineering, University of Tokyo（东京大学复杂科学与工程系）；School of Automation, Southeast University（东南大学自动化学院）
