arXiv AI

InfMasking: A Unified Variational Framework for Synergistic Multimodal Learning

InfMasking introduces a unified multimodal learning framework that uses Infinite Masking to encourage fusion modules to capture synergistic information across modalities. By randomly masking modality features before fusion and enforcing consistency with an unmasked reference, the method discourages reliance on dominant or shared signals and promotes meaningful cross‑modal interactions. The approach models masked fused representations as Gaussian, optimizing closed‑form variational bounds, and demonstrates improved predictive performance and higher synergy metrics on benchmark datasets.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Generalized Multimodal Foundation Model

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
arXiv AI
Oct 9

HRIL: Learning Multimodal Synergy via Higher-Order Tensor Modeling

The paper introduces HRIL, a method for learning multimodal representations that explicitly models higher‑order interactions among modalities using a cross‑moment tensor and Tucker decomposition. It adds a synergy‑aware regularizer to preserve higher‑order coupling capacity, aiming to capture synergistic signals that only emerge from joint configurations of multiple modalities. Experiments on controlled synergy tasks and real‑world benchmarks show consistent improvements over existing multimodal contrastive methods, especially on tasks dominated by synergistic interactions.

By Qun Dai, Liangjian Wen, Jiang Duan, Yong Dai, Dongkai Wang, Maolin Wang, Mingjie Wang, Jianzhuang Liu, He Yan, Zhao Kang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 10

SynIB: Informational Bottleneck for Maximizing Synergy in Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606. 09853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central objective in multimodal learning is to capture synergy: task-relevant information that arises only from the joint use of multiple modalities, and is not available from any single modality alone.

By Konstantinos Kontras, Teodora Gagaleska, Thomas Strypsteen, Christos Chatzichristos, Matthew Blaschko, Maarten De Vos, Paul Pu Liang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

Fusion Anything: A Generalized Multimodal Foundation Model

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 Computer Vision
Oct 16

FuseAdapt: Parameter-Efficient Multimodal Fusion for Semantic Segmentation with Missing Modalities

FuseAdapt is a parameter‑efficient framework for multimodal semantic segmentation that performs fusion within the adaptation space of a frozen vision foundation model (VFM). Instead of a separate fusion network, each modality receives a lightweight adaptation branch, and only low‑rank residual activations are routed across modalities inside the frozen backbone. The method also introduces Predictive Modality Modeling (PMM) to handle missing modalities during training, achieving significant mIoU gains on three benchmarks.

By Xin Zhang, Robby T. Tan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Confidence Falls Short: Asymmetric Certainty Gains from Optimization Hinder Multimodal Classification

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Mitigating Strong-Modality Collapse in Multimodal Learning via Inverted Asymmetric Fusion

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