A Controlled Visual-Backbone Benchmark for Multimodal Short-Term Solar Irradiance Forecasting

Sky-image irradiance studies often compare forecasting systems in which the image encoder, temporal model, fusion block, target definition, and training recipe all change together. We use a narrower protocol: the multimodal forecasting pipeline is fixed, and only the visual backbone is varied. The shared setup keeps preprocessing, clear-sky-index normalization, weather-history encoding, fusion, regression head, loss, optimizer schedule, seed, and chronological split policy unchanged. We compare ConvNeXt, Swin Transformer, VMamba, Spatial Mamba, and MambaVision backbones for 10min-ahead forecasting on Folsom and a strict matched NREL split. Forecast skill is measured against clear-sky-index smart persistence, and temporal-only rows are reported as weather-history diagnostics rather than as the main ranking criterion. On the Folsom strict split, all evaluated visual-backbone runs improve over smart persistence. In the evaluated single-seed strict runs, VMamba Small and Swin Base reach matched Folsom RMSE values of 65.39 W/m^2 and 65.50 W/m^2; the temporal-only diagnostic reaches 69.51 W/m^2. On the 313-sample NREL strict split, smart persistence remains strongest at 17.48 W/m^2, while the lowest visual RMSE is obtained by Swin Tiny at 23.76 W/m^2. These results provide a reproducible encoder comparison under one fixed multimodal operating point rather than establishing architecture-level dominance, statistically resolved ranking, or fully optimized forecasting performance. Code available here: https://github.com/Oshadha345/irradiance_benchmark

MambaRefine-CD: MambaVision with Region-Boundary Temporal Refinement

Binary change detection in remote sensing requires both complete changed-region localization and accurate boundary delineation. We present MambaRefine-CD, a region-boundary temporal refinement framework built on a shared MambaVision encoder. The proposed D-RBI module constructs temporal evidence from paired features, absolute differences, and signed differences, then separates it into region and Sobel-conditioned boundary streams. Region features are enhanced with CRAM-lite and decoded by an adaptive receptive-field FPN, while the finest boundary stream guides a bounded residual refinement of the coarse prediction. Experiments on DSIFN-CD and WHU-CD show strong changed-class F1 and IoU under verified evaluation settings, and ablations support the contribution of signed temporal evidence and the full region-boundary refinement pipeline.

A Controlled Benchmark of Visual State-Space Backbones with Domain-Shift and Boundary Analysis for Remote-Sensing Segmentation

Visual state-space models (SSMs) are increasingly promoted as efficient alternatives to Vision Transformers, yet their practical advantages remain unclear under fair comparison because existing studies rarely isolate encoder effects from decoder and training choices. We present a strictly controlled benchmark of representative visual SSM families, including VMamba, MambaVision, and Spatial-Mamba, for remote-sensing semantic segmentation, in which only the encoder varies across experiments. Evaluated on LoveDA and ISPRS Potsdam under a unified 4-stage feature interface and a fixed lightweight decoder, the benchmark reveals three main findings, intra-family scaling yields only modest gains, cross-domain generalization is strongly asymmetric, and boundary delineation is the dominant failure mode under distribution shift. Although visual SSMs achieve favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-offs relative to the controlled CNN and Transformer baselines considered here, the results suggest that future improvements are more likely to come from robustness-oriented design and boundary-aware decoding than from encoder scaling alone. By isolating encoder behavior under a unified and reproducible protocol, this study establishes a practical reference benchmark for the design and evaluation of future Mamba-based segmentation backbones