Not All Modalities Are Equal: Instruction-Aware Gating for Multimodal Videos

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ding, Bonan, Nawaz, Umair, Khan, Ufaq, Shaker, Abdelrahman M., Khan, Muhammad Haris, Cao, Jiale, Xie, Jin, Khan, Fahad Shahbaz
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Ding, Bonan
Nawaz, Umair
Khan, Ufaq
Shaker, Abdelrahman M.
Khan, Muhammad Haris
Cao, Jiale
Xie, Jin
Khan, Fahad Shahbaz
author_facet Ding, Bonan
Nawaz, Umair
Khan, Ufaq
Shaker, Abdelrahman M.
Khan, Muhammad Haris
Cao, Jiale
Xie, Jin
Khan, Fahad Shahbaz
contents Pre-trained video large language models excel at visual reasoning. However, they struggle when videos arrive with auxiliary streams, such as audio, depth map, or dense temporal evidence. In such a scenario, uniform fusion induces modality interference, allowing irrelevant channels to distract the model. To address this issue, we present a unified multimodal video understanding framework, named UniMVU, that performs instruction-aware fusion across video, audio, depth map, or any other modality inputs via two levels of dynamic gating: inner-modality gates emphasize salient regions within each modality, whereas modality-level gates re-weight whole streams; both are conditioned on the text instruction to adaptively balance modality importance. Our UniMVU combines cross-modal self-attention with instruction-driven inner-modality gating module and a modality-level gating module with control token; for time-aligned streams we further adopt a fast-to-slow fusion scheme that reduces redundancy. Across six benchmarks (AVQA, AVSD, Music-AVQA, ScanQA, SQA3D and MVBench), our UniMVU achieves consistent gains over static-fusion baselines achieving gains as high as 13.5 in terms of CIDEr metric. Further, our analysis shows that the gating mechanism aligns with the human-interpretable modality relevance, and ablations show the contributions of inner-modality and modality-level gating. Our UniMVU provides a simple, unified recipe for instruction-aware multimodal video understanding that scales to diverse modalities without hand-crafted fusion rules.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_26232
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Not All Modalities Are Equal: Instruction-Aware Gating for Multimodal Videos
Ding, Bonan
Nawaz, Umair
Khan, Ufaq
Shaker, Abdelrahman M.
Khan, Muhammad Haris
Cao, Jiale
Xie, Jin
Khan, Fahad Shahbaz
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Pre-trained video large language models excel at visual reasoning. However, they struggle when videos arrive with auxiliary streams, such as audio, depth map, or dense temporal evidence. In such a scenario, uniform fusion induces modality interference, allowing irrelevant channels to distract the model. To address this issue, we present a unified multimodal video understanding framework, named UniMVU, that performs instruction-aware fusion across video, audio, depth map, or any other modality inputs via two levels of dynamic gating: inner-modality gates emphasize salient regions within each modality, whereas modality-level gates re-weight whole streams; both are conditioned on the text instruction to adaptively balance modality importance. Our UniMVU combines cross-modal self-attention with instruction-driven inner-modality gating module and a modality-level gating module with control token; for time-aligned streams we further adopt a fast-to-slow fusion scheme that reduces redundancy. Across six benchmarks (AVQA, AVSD, Music-AVQA, ScanQA, SQA3D and MVBench), our UniMVU achieves consistent gains over static-fusion baselines achieving gains as high as 13.5 in terms of CIDEr metric. Further, our analysis shows that the gating mechanism aligns with the human-interpretable modality relevance, and ablations show the contributions of inner-modality and modality-level gating. Our UniMVU provides a simple, unified recipe for instruction-aware multimodal video understanding that scales to diverse modalities without hand-crafted fusion rules.
title Not All Modalities Are Equal: Instruction-Aware Gating for Multimodal Videos
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26232