The paper introduces a generalized multimodal foundation model that can handle arbitrary combinations of modalities and prediction tasks. It trains on large-scale synthetic multimodal datasets with diverse causal structures to learn transferable multimodal correlations. Experiments on 18 real-world datasets across 12 modalities and 11 tasks show competitive performance compared to specialized models without task-specific adaptation.
By Huizi Cui, Zongbo Han, Chenggong Ding, Naichuan Xiao, Jialong Yang, Jingdong Chen, Guangyu Wang, Qinghua Hu, Changqing Zhang
The paper identifies that in multimodal learning, optimization often produces asymmetric certainty gains, with the stronger modality becoming more confident than the weaker one, which leads to imbalanced contributions and suboptimal performance. The authors attribute this issue to unimodal characteristics and propose a Max Confidence Regularization (MaxCR) method that tracks each modality’s semantic confidence via a nonlinear sparsity measure and applies max suppression and excitation to balance confidence levels. Experiments on standard datasets demonstrate that MaxCR improves overall performance compared to state‑of‑the‑art multimodal baselines.
By Longfei Huang, Xiangyu Wu, Yang Yang
The paper introduces Fusion Anything Model (FAM), a foundation model designed for generalized multimodal data fusion that can handle arbitrary modality combinations and prediction tasks. FAM is trained on large-scale synthetic multimodal datasets generated via Structural Multimodal Causal Models (SMCMs), enabling it to encode transferable multimodal correlations. Experiments on 18 real-world datasets across 12 modalities and 11 tasks show that FAM performs competitively with specialized models without requiring task-specific adaptation.
By Huizi Cui, Zongbo Han, Chenggong Ding, Naichuan Xiao, Jialong Yang, Jingdong Chen, Guangyu Wang, Qinghua Hu, Changqing Zhang
arXiv:2608. 02769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal supervised learning seeks to leverage multiple heterogeneous data sources to improve predictive performance.
By Sagnik Nandy, Samriddha Lahiry, Pragya Sur, Subhabrata Sen
arXiv:2606. 02679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal systems often benefit from combining information across language, sound, and visual streams, but this benefit is not guaranteed.
By Jiyuan Liu, Liangwei Nathan Zheng, Wei Emma Zhang, Xinpei Wang, Weitong Chen
arXiv:2505. 19614v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal learning has seen remarkable progress, particularly with large-scale pre-training across various modalities.
By Sanghyuk Chun, Olga Russakovsky
arXiv:2606. 11190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all -- a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality.
By Ilay Kamai, Hugues Van Assel, Aviv Regev, Hagai B. Perets, Randall Balestriero
arXiv:2601.21670v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Multimodal fusion is often treated as an optimization-balancing problem, where training signals are adjusted to prevent one modality from dom...
By Zixuan Xia, Hao Wang, Pengcheng Weng, Yanyu Qian, Yangxin Xu, William Dan, Fei Wang
arXiv:2607. 27289v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The promise of multimodal fusion lies in combining complementary sources of evidence, yet more evidence does not always yield a better prediction.
By Yu Chang, Anzhe Cheng, Chenwei Wu, Zhuoran Wang, Jiahao Chen, Tamoghna Chattopadhyay, Sophia I. Thomopoulos, Paul M. Thompson, Liyue Shen, Paul Bogdan
The paper introduces Inverted Asymmetric Fusion (IAF) to address strong-modality collapse in multimodal learning, where dominant modalities are degraded during fusion. IAF preserves the dominant modality by passing it unchanged and letting weaker modalities attend to it, while also strengthening weaker modalities via Modality-Aware Knowledge Distillation. Experiments on MultiHuSE, UR-FUNNY, and MUStARD show that IAF maintains unimodal performance and improves over the best unimodal baseline by up to 8.25%.
By Mary Ogbuka Kenneth, Foaad Khosmood, Abbas Edalat
Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all -- a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality. We develop a unified linear framework that addresses both questions.
arXiv:2603. 22372v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal learning have motivated the integration of auxiliary modalities such as text or vision into time series (TS) forecasting.
By Seunghan Lee, Jun Seo, Jaehoon Lee, Sungdong Yoo, Minjae Kim, Tae Yoon Lim, Dongwan Kang, Hwanil Choi, SoonYoung Lee, Wonbin Ahn