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