Multimodal Transformers are Hierarchical Modal-wise Heterogeneous Graphs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jin, Yijie, Peng, Junjie, Lin, Xuanchao, Yuan, Haochen, Wang, Lan, Zheng, Cangzhi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jin, Yijie
Peng, Junjie
Lin, Xuanchao
Yuan, Haochen
Wang, Lan
Zheng, Cangzhi
author_facet Jin, Yijie
Peng, Junjie
Lin, Xuanchao
Yuan, Haochen
Wang, Lan
Zheng, Cangzhi
contents Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) is a rapidly developing field that integrates multimodal information to recognize sentiments, and existing models have made significant progress in this area. The central challenge in MSA is multimodal fusion, which is predominantly addressed by Multimodal Transformers (MulTs). Although act as the paradigm, MulTs suffer from efficiency concerns. In this work, from the perspective of efficiency optimization, we propose and prove that MulTs are hierarchical modal-wise heterogeneous graphs (HMHGs), and we introduce the graph-structured representation pattern of MulTs. Based on this pattern, we propose an Interlaced Mask (IM) mechanism to design the Graph-Structured and Interlaced-Masked Multimodal Transformer (GsiT). It is formally equivalent to MulTs which achieves an efficient weight-sharing mechanism without information disorder through IM, enabling All-Modal-In-One fusion with only 1/3 of the parameters of pure MulTs. A Triton kernel called Decomposition is implemented to ensure avoiding additional computational overhead. Moreover, it achieves significantly higher performance than traditional MulTs. To further validate the effectiveness of GsiT itself and the HMHG concept, we integrate them into multiple state-of-the-art models and demonstrate notable performance improvements and parameter reduction on widely used MSA datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_01068
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Transformers are Hierarchical Modal-wise Heterogeneous Graphs
Jin, Yijie
Peng, Junjie
Lin, Xuanchao
Yuan, Haochen
Wang, Lan
Zheng, Cangzhi
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) is a rapidly developing field that integrates multimodal information to recognize sentiments, and existing models have made significant progress in this area. The central challenge in MSA is multimodal fusion, which is predominantly addressed by Multimodal Transformers (MulTs). Although act as the paradigm, MulTs suffer from efficiency concerns. In this work, from the perspective of efficiency optimization, we propose and prove that MulTs are hierarchical modal-wise heterogeneous graphs (HMHGs), and we introduce the graph-structured representation pattern of MulTs. Based on this pattern, we propose an Interlaced Mask (IM) mechanism to design the Graph-Structured and Interlaced-Masked Multimodal Transformer (GsiT). It is formally equivalent to MulTs which achieves an efficient weight-sharing mechanism without information disorder through IM, enabling All-Modal-In-One fusion with only 1/3 of the parameters of pure MulTs. A Triton kernel called Decomposition is implemented to ensure avoiding additional computational overhead. Moreover, it achieves significantly higher performance than traditional MulTs. To further validate the effectiveness of GsiT itself and the HMHG concept, we integrate them into multiple state-of-the-art models and demonstrate notable performance improvements and parameter reduction on widely used MSA datasets.
title Multimodal Transformers are Hierarchical Modal-wise Heterogeneous Graphs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01068