FLUID: Flow-Latent Unified Integration via Token Distillation for Expert Specialization in Multimodal Learning

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Main Authors: Cuong, Van Duc, Tam, Ta Dinh, Chinh, Tran Duc, Hanh, Nguyen Thi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cuong, Van Duc
Tam, Ta Dinh
Chinh, Tran Duc
Hanh, Nguyen Thi
author_facet Cuong, Van Duc
Tam, Ta Dinh
Chinh, Tran Duc
Hanh, Nguyen Thi
contents Multimodal classification requires robust integration of visual and textual signals, yet common fusion strategies are brittle and vulnerable to modality-specific noise. In this paper, we present \textsc{FLUID}-Flow-Latent Unified Integration via Token Distillation for Expert Specialization, a principled token-level pipeline that improves cross-modal robustness and scalability. \textsc{FLUID} contributes three core elements: (1) \emph{Q-transforms}, learnable query tokens that distill and retain salient token-level features from modality-specific backbones; (2) a two-stage fusion scheme that enforces cross-modal consistency via contrastive alignment and then performs adaptive, task-aware fusion through a gating mechanism and a \emph{Q-bottleneck} that selectively compresses information for downstream reasoning; and (3) a lightweight, load-balanced Mixture-of-Experts at prediction time that enables efficient specialization to diverse semantic patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textsc{FLUID} attains \(91\%\) accuracy on the GLAMI-1M benchmark, significantly outperforming prior baselines and exhibiting strong resilience to label noise, long-tail class imbalance, and semantic heterogeneity. Targeted ablation studies corroborate both the individual and synergistic benefits of the proposed components, positioning \textsc{FLUID} as a scalable, noise-resilient solution for multimodal product classification.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07264
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FLUID: Flow-Latent Unified Integration via Token Distillation for Expert Specialization in Multimodal Learning
Cuong, Van Duc
Tam, Ta Dinh
Chinh, Tran Duc
Hanh, Nguyen Thi
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Multimodal classification requires robust integration of visual and textual signals, yet common fusion strategies are brittle and vulnerable to modality-specific noise. In this paper, we present \textsc{FLUID}-Flow-Latent Unified Integration via Token Distillation for Expert Specialization, a principled token-level pipeline that improves cross-modal robustness and scalability. \textsc{FLUID} contributes three core elements: (1) \emph{Q-transforms}, learnable query tokens that distill and retain salient token-level features from modality-specific backbones; (2) a two-stage fusion scheme that enforces cross-modal consistency via contrastive alignment and then performs adaptive, task-aware fusion through a gating mechanism and a \emph{Q-bottleneck} that selectively compresses information for downstream reasoning; and (3) a lightweight, load-balanced Mixture-of-Experts at prediction time that enables efficient specialization to diverse semantic patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textsc{FLUID} attains \(91\%\) accuracy on the GLAMI-1M benchmark, significantly outperforming prior baselines and exhibiting strong resilience to label noise, long-tail class imbalance, and semantic heterogeneity. Targeted ablation studies corroborate both the individual and synergistic benefits of the proposed components, positioning \textsc{FLUID} as a scalable, noise-resilient solution for multimodal product classification.
title FLUID: Flow-Latent Unified Integration via Token Distillation for Expert Specialization in Multimodal Learning
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07264