Multimodal Negative Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gong, Baoquan, Gao, Xiyuan, Zhu, Pengfei, Hu, Qinghua, Cao, Bing
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Gong, Baoquan
Gao, Xiyuan
Zhu, Pengfei
Hu, Qinghua
Cao, Bing
author_facet Gong, Baoquan
Gao, Xiyuan
Zhu, Pengfei
Hu, Qinghua
Cao, Bing
contents Multimodal learning systems often encounter challenges related to modality imbalance, where a dominant modality may overshadow others, thereby hindering the learning of weak modalities. Conventional approaches often force weak modalities to align with dominant ones in "Learning to be (the same)" (Positive Learning), which risks suppressing the unique information inherent in the weak modalities. To address this challenge, we offer a new learning paradigm: "Learning Not to be" (Negative Learning). Instead of enhancing weak modalities' target-class predictions, the dominant modalities dynamically guide the weak modality to suppress non-target classes. This stabilizes the decision space and preserves modality-specific information, allowing weak modalities to preserve unique information without being over-aligned. We proceed to reveal multimodal learning from a robustness perspective and theoretically derive the Multimodal Negative Learning (MNL) framework, which introduces a dynamic guidance mechanism tailored for negative learning. Our method provably tightens the robustness lower bound of multimodal learning by increasing the Unimodal Confidence Margin (UCoM) and reduces the empirical error of weak modalities, particularly under noisy and imbalanced scenarios. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach against competing methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/BaoquanGong/Multimodal-Negative-Learning.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_20877
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Negative Learning
Gong, Baoquan
Gao, Xiyuan
Zhu, Pengfei
Hu, Qinghua
Cao, Bing
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Multimodal learning systems often encounter challenges related to modality imbalance, where a dominant modality may overshadow others, thereby hindering the learning of weak modalities. Conventional approaches often force weak modalities to align with dominant ones in "Learning to be (the same)" (Positive Learning), which risks suppressing the unique information inherent in the weak modalities. To address this challenge, we offer a new learning paradigm: "Learning Not to be" (Negative Learning). Instead of enhancing weak modalities' target-class predictions, the dominant modalities dynamically guide the weak modality to suppress non-target classes. This stabilizes the decision space and preserves modality-specific information, allowing weak modalities to preserve unique information without being over-aligned. We proceed to reveal multimodal learning from a robustness perspective and theoretically derive the Multimodal Negative Learning (MNL) framework, which introduces a dynamic guidance mechanism tailored for negative learning. Our method provably tightens the robustness lower bound of multimodal learning by increasing the Unimodal Confidence Margin (UCoM) and reduces the empirical error of weak modalities, particularly under noisy and imbalanced scenarios. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach against competing methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/BaoquanGong/Multimodal-Negative-Learning.git.
title Multimodal Negative Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20877