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:2602. 07026v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the success of multimodal contrastive learning in aligning visual and linguistic representations, a persistent geometric anomaly, the Modality Gap, remains: embeddings of distinct modalities expressing identical semantics occupy systematically offset regions.
By Xiaomin Yu, Yi Xin, Yuhui Zhang, Wenjie Zhang, Chonghan Liu, Hanzhen Zhao, Chen Liu, Xiaoxing Hu, Ziyue Qiao, Hao Tang, Xiaobin Hu, Chengwei Qin, Hui Xiong, Yu Qiao, Shuicheng Yan
arXiv:2607. 05019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multimodal classification, late-fusion approaches classify concatenated modality-specific features extracted by unimodal neural networks.
By Ilya Burenko, Dmitry Vetrov
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
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: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:2609.23533v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal classifiers can converge to modality-dominant solutions in which one modality dominates the joint prediction, suppressing the learning of ot...
By Zechang Xiong, Da Li, Rong Yin, Kexin Tang, Biao Yang, Pengyuan Li, Wenkang Kong, Yulan Hu, Shengyu Zhu, Hao Peng
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:2604. 09787v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data collected from the physical world is always a combination of multiple sources: an underlying signal from the physical process of interest and a signal from measurement-dependent artifacts from the sensor or instrument.
By Pablo Mercader-Perez, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Daniel Muthukrishna, Jeroen Audenaert, V. Ashley Villar, David W. Hogg, Marc Huertas-Company, William T. Freeman
arXiv:2606. 12362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study multimodal learning under missing modalities, with particular motivation from bioscience applications in which heterogeneous modalities are often only partially available when decisions need to be made.
By Hui Wang, Tianyu Ren, Joseph Butler, Christopher Baker, Karen Rafferty, Simon McDade
The paper introduces a framework to tackle modality imbalance in multimodal learning by focusing on sample-level variations. It defines a Modality Gap metric to measure prediction discrepancies, models the resulting bimodal distribution with a Gaussian Mixture Model, and uses Bayesian probabilities for soft separation of balanced and imbalanced samples. A two‑stage training process—Warm‑up and Adaptive Training—reallocates loss weights based on the GMM, strengthening alignment for imbalanced samples while favoring fusion for balanced ones, and shows superior performance over existing baselines.
By Zhiwen Yu, Zhaocheng Liu, Xiaoqing Liu, Huanqiang Zeng, C. L. Philip Chen