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Main Authors: Shi, Xiang, Zhang, Rui, Liu, Jiawei, Liu, Yinpeng, Cheng, Qikai, Lu, Wei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00030
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author Shi, Xiang
Zhang, Rui
Liu, Jiawei
Liu, Yinpeng
Cheng, Qikai
Lu, Wei
author_facet Shi, Xiang
Zhang, Rui
Liu, Jiawei
Liu, Yinpeng
Cheng, Qikai
Lu, Wei
contents Multimodal fusion is susceptible to modality imbalance, where dominant modalities overshadow weak ones, easily leading to biased learning and suboptimal fusion, especially for incomplete modality conditions. To address this problem, we propose a Shapley-guided alternating training framework that adaptively prioritizes minor modalities to balance and thus enhance the fusion. Our method leverages Shapley Value-based scheduling to improve the training sequence adaptively, ensuring that under-optimized modalities receive sufficient learning. Additionally, we introduce the memory module to refine and inherit modality-specific representations with a cross-modal mapping mechanism to align features at both the feature and sample levels. To further validate the adaptability of the proposed approach, the encoder module empirically adopts both conventional and LLM-based backbones. With building up a novel multimodal equilibrium metric, namely, equilibrium deviation metric (EDM), we evaluate the performance in both balance and accuracy across four multimodal benchmark datasets, where our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Meanwhile, robustness analysis under missing modalities highlights its strong generalization capabilities. Accordingly, our findings reveal the untapped potential of alternating training, demonstrating that strategic modality prioritization fundamentally balances and promotes multimodal learning, offering a new paradigm for optimizing multimodal training dynamics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00030
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modality Equilibrium Matters: Minor-Modality-Aware Adaptive Alternating for Cross-Modal Memory Enhancement
Shi, Xiang
Zhang, Rui
Liu, Jiawei
Liu, Yinpeng
Cheng, Qikai
Lu, Wei
Machine Learning
Multimodal fusion is susceptible to modality imbalance, where dominant modalities overshadow weak ones, easily leading to biased learning and suboptimal fusion, especially for incomplete modality conditions. To address this problem, we propose a Shapley-guided alternating training framework that adaptively prioritizes minor modalities to balance and thus enhance the fusion. Our method leverages Shapley Value-based scheduling to improve the training sequence adaptively, ensuring that under-optimized modalities receive sufficient learning. Additionally, we introduce the memory module to refine and inherit modality-specific representations with a cross-modal mapping mechanism to align features at both the feature and sample levels. To further validate the adaptability of the proposed approach, the encoder module empirically adopts both conventional and LLM-based backbones. With building up a novel multimodal equilibrium metric, namely, equilibrium deviation metric (EDM), we evaluate the performance in both balance and accuracy across four multimodal benchmark datasets, where our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Meanwhile, robustness analysis under missing modalities highlights its strong generalization capabilities. Accordingly, our findings reveal the untapped potential of alternating training, demonstrating that strategic modality prioritization fundamentally balances and promotes multimodal learning, offering a new paradigm for optimizing multimodal training dynamics.
title Modality Equilibrium Matters: Minor-Modality-Aware Adaptive Alternating for Cross-Modal Memory Enhancement
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00030