Principled Multimodal Representation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Liu, Xiaohao, Xia, Xiaobo, Ng, See-Kiong, Chua, Tat-Seng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Liu, Xiaohao
Xia, Xiaobo
Ng, See-Kiong
Chua, Tat-Seng
author_facet Liu, Xiaohao
Xia, Xiaobo
Ng, See-Kiong
Chua, Tat-Seng
contents Multimodal representation learning seeks to create a unified representation space by integrating diverse data modalities to improve multimodal understanding. Traditional methods often depend on pairwise contrastive learning, which relies on a predefined anchor modality, restricting alignment across all modalities. Recent advances have investigated the simultaneous alignment of multiple modalities, yet several challenges remain, such as limitations imposed by fixed anchor points and instability arising from optimizing the product of singular values. To address the challenges, in this paper, we propose Principled Multimodal Representation Learning (PMRL), a novel framework that achieves simultaneous alignment of multiple modalities without anchor dependency in a more stable manner. Specifically, grounded in the theoretical insight that full alignment corresponds to a rank-1 Gram matrix, PMRL optimizes the dominant singular value of the representation matrix to align modalities along a shared leading direction. We propose a softmax-based loss function that treats singular values as logits to prioritize the largest singular value. Besides, instance-wise contrastive regularization on the leading eigenvectors maintains inter-instance separability and prevents representation collapse. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate PMRL's superiority compared to baseline methods. Source code can be found in https://github.com/Xiaohao-Liu/PMRL.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_17343
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Principled Multimodal Representation Learning
Liu, Xiaohao
Xia, Xiaobo
Ng, See-Kiong
Chua, Tat-Seng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Multimedia
Multimodal representation learning seeks to create a unified representation space by integrating diverse data modalities to improve multimodal understanding. Traditional methods often depend on pairwise contrastive learning, which relies on a predefined anchor modality, restricting alignment across all modalities. Recent advances have investigated the simultaneous alignment of multiple modalities, yet several challenges remain, such as limitations imposed by fixed anchor points and instability arising from optimizing the product of singular values. To address the challenges, in this paper, we propose Principled Multimodal Representation Learning (PMRL), a novel framework that achieves simultaneous alignment of multiple modalities without anchor dependency in a more stable manner. Specifically, grounded in the theoretical insight that full alignment corresponds to a rank-1 Gram matrix, PMRL optimizes the dominant singular value of the representation matrix to align modalities along a shared leading direction. We propose a softmax-based loss function that treats singular values as logits to prioritize the largest singular value. Besides, instance-wise contrastive regularization on the leading eigenvectors maintains inter-instance separability and prevents representation collapse. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate PMRL's superiority compared to baseline methods. Source code can be found in https://github.com/Xiaohao-Liu/PMRL.
title Principled Multimodal Representation Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17343