BrokenBind: Universal Modality Exploration beyond Dataset Boundaries

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Huang, Zhuo, Chen, Runnan, Han, Bo, Niu, Gang, Sugiyama, Masashi, Liu, Tongliang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917254324551680
author Huang, Zhuo
Chen, Runnan
Han, Bo
Niu, Gang
Sugiyama, Masashi
Liu, Tongliang
author_facet Huang, Zhuo
Chen, Runnan
Han, Bo
Niu, Gang
Sugiyama, Masashi
Liu, Tongliang
contents Multi-modal learning combines various modalities to provide a comprehensive understanding of real-world problems. A common strategy is to directly bind different modalities together in a specific joint embedding space. However, the capability of existing methods is restricted within the modalities presented in the given dataset, thus they are biased when generalizing to unpresented modalities in downstream tasks. As a result, due to such inflexibility, the viability of previous methods is seriously hindered by the cost of acquiring multi-modal datasets. In this paper, we introduce BrokenBind, which focuses on binding modalities that are presented from different datasets. To achieve this, BrokenBind simultaneously leverages multiple datasets containing the modalities of interest and one shared modality. Though the two datasets do not correspond to each other due to distribution mismatch, we can capture their relationship to generate pseudo embeddings to fill in the missing modalities of interest, enabling flexible and generalized multi-modal learning. Under our framework, any two modalities can be bound together, free from the dataset limitation, to achieve universal modality exploration. Further, to reveal the capability of our method, we study intensified scenarios where more than two datasets are needed for modality binding and show the effectiveness of BrokenBind in low-data regimes. Through extensive evaluation, we carefully justify the superiority of BrokenBind compared to well-known multi-modal baseline methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_06451
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BrokenBind: Universal Modality Exploration beyond Dataset Boundaries
Huang, Zhuo
Chen, Runnan
Han, Bo
Niu, Gang
Sugiyama, Masashi
Liu, Tongliang
Machine Learning
Multi-modal learning combines various modalities to provide a comprehensive understanding of real-world problems. A common strategy is to directly bind different modalities together in a specific joint embedding space. However, the capability of existing methods is restricted within the modalities presented in the given dataset, thus they are biased when generalizing to unpresented modalities in downstream tasks. As a result, due to such inflexibility, the viability of previous methods is seriously hindered by the cost of acquiring multi-modal datasets. In this paper, we introduce BrokenBind, which focuses on binding modalities that are presented from different datasets. To achieve this, BrokenBind simultaneously leverages multiple datasets containing the modalities of interest and one shared modality. Though the two datasets do not correspond to each other due to distribution mismatch, we can capture their relationship to generate pseudo embeddings to fill in the missing modalities of interest, enabling flexible and generalized multi-modal learning. Under our framework, any two modalities can be bound together, free from the dataset limitation, to achieve universal modality exploration. Further, to reveal the capability of our method, we study intensified scenarios where more than two datasets are needed for modality binding and show the effectiveness of BrokenBind in low-data regimes. Through extensive evaluation, we carefully justify the superiority of BrokenBind compared to well-known multi-modal baseline methods.
title BrokenBind: Universal Modality Exploration beyond Dataset Boundaries
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06451