Sensory training during the early ages is vital for human development. Inspired by this cognitive phenomenon, we observe that the early training stage is also important for the multimodal learning process, where dataset information is rapidly acquired. We refer to this stage as the prime learning window. However, based on our observation, this prime learning window in multimodal learning is often dominated by information-sufficient modalities, which in turn suppresses the information acquisition of information-insufficient modalities. To address this issue, we propose Information Acquisition Regulation (InfoReg), a method designed to balance information acquisition among modalities. Specifically, InfoReg slows down the information acquisition process of information-sufficient modalities during the prime learning window, which could promote information acquisition of information-insufficient modalities. This regulation enables a more balanced learning process and improves the overall performance of the multimodal network. Experiments show that InfoReg outperforms related multimodal imbalanced methods across various datasets, achieving superior model performance. The code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/InfoReg_CVPR2025.

Visuo-tactile sensors aim to emulate human tactile perception, enabling robots to precisely understand and manipulate objects. Over time, numerous meticulously designed visuo-tactile sensors have been integrated into robotic systems, aiding in completing various tasks. However, the distinct data characteristics of these low-standardized visuo-tactile sensors hinder the establishment of a powerful tactile perception system. We consider that the key to addressing this issue lies in learning unified multi-sensor representations, thereby integrating the sensors and promoting tactile knowledge transfer between them. To achieve unified representation of this nature, we introduce TacQuad, an aligned multi-modal multi-sensor tactile dataset from four different visuo-tactile sensors, which enables the explicit integration of various sensors. Recognizing that humans perceive the physical environment by acquiring diverse tactile information such as texture and pressure changes, we further propose to learn unified multi-sensor representations from both static and dynamic perspectives. By integrating tactile images and videos, we present AnyTouch, a unified static-dynamic multi-sensor representation learning framework with a multi-level structure, aimed at both enhancing comprehensive perceptual abilities and enabling effective cross-sensor transfer. This multi-level architecture captures pixel-level details from tactile data via masked modeling and enhances perception and transferability by learning semantic-level sensor-agnostic features through multi-modal alignment and cross-sensor matching. We provide a comprehensive analysis of multi-sensor transferability, and validate our method on various datasets and in the real-world pouring task. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing methods, exhibits outstanding static and dynamic perception capabilities across various sensors.

Training multimodal models requires a large amount of labeled data. Active learning (AL) aim to reduce labeling costs. Most AL methods employ warm-start approaches, which rely on sufficient labeled data to train a well-calibrated model that can assess the uncertainty and diversity of unlabeled data. However, when assembling a dataset, labeled data are often scarce initially, leading to a cold-start problem. Additionally, most AL methods seldom address multimodal data, highlighting a research gap in this field. Our research addresses these issues by developing a two-stage method for Multi-Modal Cold-Start Active Learning (MMCSAL). Firstly, we observe the modality gap, a significant distance between the centroids of representations from different modalities, when only using cross-modal pairing information as self-supervision signals. This modality gap affects data selection process, as we calculate both uni-modal and cross-modal distances. To address this, we introduce uni-modal prototypes to bridge the modality gap. Secondly, conventional AL methods often falter in multimodal scenarios where alignment between modalities is overlooked. Therefore, we propose enhancing cross-modal alignment through regularization, thereby improving the quality of selected multimodal data pairs in AL. Finally, our experiments demonstrate MMCSAL's efficacy in selecting multimodal data pairs across three multimodal datasets.

Abstract--Multimodal learning is expected to boost model performance by integrating information from different modalities. However, its potential is not fully exploited because the widely-used joint training strategy, which has a uniform objective for all modalities, leads to imbalanced and under-optimized uni-modal representations. Specifically, we point out that there often exists modality with more discriminative information, e.g., vision of playing football and sound of blowing wind. They could dominate the joint training process, resulting in other modalities being significantly under-optimized. To alleviate this problem, we first analyze the under-optimized phenomenon from both the feed-forward and the back-propagation stages during optimization. Then, On-the-fly Prediction Modulation (OPM) and On-the-fly Gradient Modulation (OGM) strategies are proposed to modulate the optimization of each modality, by monitoring the discriminative discrepancy between modalities during training. Concretely, OPM weakens the influence of the dominant modality by dropping its feature with dynamical probability in the feed-forward stage, while OGM mitigates its gradient in the back-propagation stage. In experiments, our methods demonstrate considerable improvement across a variety of multimodal tasks. These simple yet effective strategies not only enhance performance in vanilla and task-oriented multimodal models, but also in more complex multimodal tasks, showcasing their effectiveness and flexibility. This process is known in cognitive specific modality are proposed [8], [11], but they inevitably neuroscience as multi-sensory integration [1].

Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to achieve pixel-level localization of sound sources in videos, while Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation (AVSS), as an extension of AVS, further pursues semantic understanding of audio-visual scenes. However, since the AVSS task requires the establishment of audio-visual correspondence and semantic understanding simultaneously, we observe that previous methods have struggled to handle this mashup of objectives in end-to-end training, resulting in insufficient learning and sub-optimization. Therefore, we propose a two-stage training strategy called \textit{Stepping Stones}, which decomposes the AVSS task into two simple subtasks from localization to semantic understanding, which are fully optimized in each stage to achieve step-by-step global optimization. This training strategy has also proved its generalization and effectiveness on existing methods. To further improve the performance of AVS tasks, we propose a novel framework Adaptive Audio Visual Segmentation, in which we incorporate an adaptive audio query generator and integrate masked attention into the transformer decoder, facilitating the adaptive fusion of visual and audio features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art results on all three AVS benchmarks. The project homepage can be accessed at https://gewu-lab.github.io/stepping_stones/.

Traditional reference segmentation tasks have predominantly focused on silent visual scenes, neglecting the integral role of multimodal perception and interaction in human experiences. In this work, we introduce a novel task called Reference Audio-Visual Segmentation (Ref-AVS), which seeks to segment objects within the visual domain based on expressions containing multimodal cues. Such expressions are articulated in natural language forms but are enriched with multimodal cues, including audio and visual descriptions. To facilitate this research, we construct the first Ref-AVS benchmark, which provides pixel-level annotations for objects described in corresponding multimodal-cue expressions. To tackle the Ref-AVS task, we propose a new method that adequately utilizes multimodal cues to offer precise segmentation guidance. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments on three test subsets to compare our approach with existing methods from related tasks. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its capability to precisely segment objects using multimodal-cue expressions.

To overcome the imbalanced multimodal learning problem, where models prefer the training of specific modalities, existing methods propose to control the training of uni-modal encoders from different perspectives, taking the inter-modal performance discrepancy as the basis. However, the intrinsic limitation of modality capacity is ignored. The scarcely informative modalities can be recognized as ``worse-learnt'' ones, which could force the model to memorize more noise, counterproductively affecting the multimodal model ability. Moreover, the current modality modulation methods narrowly concentrate on selected worse-learnt modalities, even suppressing the training of others. Hence, it is essential to consider the intrinsic limitation of modality capacity and take all modalities into account during balancing. To this end, we propose the Diagnosing \& Re-learning method. The learning state of each modality is firstly estimated based on the separability of its uni-modal representation space, and then used to softly re-initialize the corresponding uni-modal encoder. In this way, the over-emphasizing of scarcely informative modalities is avoided. In addition, encoders of worse-learnt modalities are enhanced, simultaneously avoiding the over-training of other modalities. Accordingly, multimodal learning is effectively balanced and enhanced. Experiments covering multiple types of modalities and multimodal frameworks demonstrate the superior performance of our simple-yet-effective method for balanced multimodal learning. The source code and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Diagnosing_Relearning_ECCV2024}.

Representation learning approaches for robotic manipulation have boomed in recent years. Due to the scarcity of in-domain robot data, prevailing methodologies tend to leverage large-scale human video datasets to extract generalizable features for visuomotor policy learning. Despite the progress achieved, prior endeavors disregard the interactive dynamics that capture behavior patterns and physical interaction during the manipulation process, resulting in an inadequate understanding of the relationship between objects and the environment. To this end, we propose a general pre-training pipeline that learns Manipulation by Predicting the Interaction (MPI) and enhances the visual representation.Given a pair of keyframes representing the initial and final states, along with language instructions, our algorithm predicts the transition frame and detects the interaction object, respectively. These two learning objectives achieve superior comprehension towards "how-to-interact" and "where-to-interact". We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several challenging robotic tasks.The experimental results demonstrate that MPI exhibits remarkable improvement by 10% to 64% compared with previous state-of-the-art in real-world robot platforms as well as simulation environments. Code and checkpoints are publicly shared at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/MPI.

This problem has raised widely attention superior efficacy in alleviating the imbalanced recently (Zhang et al., 2024). Several methods have been multimodal learning problem. However, in this proposed to improve the training of worse learnt modality paper, we identify the previously ignored gradient with additional module (Wang et al., 2020) or modalityspecific conflict between multimodal and unimodal training strategy (Peng et al., 2022; Wu et al., 2022; learning objectives, potentially misleading the unimodal Wei et al., 2024). These methods often have one common encoder optimization. To well diminish sense that targetedly improves unimodal training. Among these conflicts, we observe the discrepancy between them, multitask-like methods that directly add unimodal multimodal loss and unimodal loss, where learning objectives besides the multimodal joint learning both gradient magnitude and covariance of the objective, exhibit their superior effectiveness for alleviating easier-to-learn multimodal loss are smaller than this imbalanced multimodal learning problem (Wang et al., the unimodal one. With this property, we analyze 2020; Du et al., 2023; Fan et al., 2023). Pareto integration under our multimodal scenario and propose MMPareto algorithm, which However, behind the effective performance, we observe a could ensure a final gradient with direction that is previously ignored risk in model optimization under this common to all learning objectives and enhanced widely used multitask-like scenario, potentially limiting magnitude to improve generalization, providing model ability. Every coin has two sides.

Multimodal fusion focuses on integrating information from multiple modalities with the goal of more accurate prediction, which has achieved remarkable progress in a wide range of scenarios, including autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. However, the reliability of multimodal fusion remains largely unexplored especially under low-quality data settings. This paper surveys the common challenges and recent advances of multimodal fusion in the wild and presents them in a comprehensive taxonomy. From a data-centric view, we identify four main challenges that are faced by multimodal fusion on low-quality data, namely (1) noisy multimodal data that are contaminated with heterogeneous noises, (2) incomplete multimodal data that some modalities are missing, (3) imbalanced multimodal data that the qualities or properties of different modalities are significantly different and (4) quality-varying multimodal data that the quality of each modality dynamically changes with respect to different samples. This new taxonomy will enable researchers to understand the state of the field and identify several potential directions. We also provide discussion for the open problems in this field together with interesting future research directions.