What Makes for Robust Multi-Modal Models in the Face of Missing Modalities?

With the growing success of multi-modal learning, research on the robustness of multi-modal models, especially when facing situations with missing modalities, is receiving increased attention. Nevertheless, previous studies in this domain exhibit certain limitations, as they often lack theoretical insights or their methodologies are tied to specific network architectures or modalities. We model the scenarios of multi-modal models encountering missing modalities from an information-theoretic perspective and illustrate that the performance ceiling in such scenarios can be approached by efficiently utilizing the information inherent in non-missing modalities. In practice, there are two key aspects: (1) The encoder should be able to extract sufficiently good features from the non-missing modality; (2) The extracted features should be robust enough not to be influenced by noise during the fusion process across modalities. To this end, we introduce Uni-Modal Ensemble with Missing Modality Adaptation (UME-MMA). UME-MMA employs uni-modal pre-trained weights for the multi-modal model to enhance feature extraction and utilizes missing modality data augmentation techniques to better adapt to situations with missing modalities. Apart from that, UME-MMA, built on a late-fusion learning framework, allows for the plug-and-play use of various encoders, making it suitable for a wide range of modalities and enabling seamless integration of large-scale pre-trained encoders to further enhance performance. And we demonstrate UME-MMA's effectiveness in audio-visual datasets~(e.g., AV-MNIST, Kinetics-Sound, AVE) and vision-language datasets~(e.g., MM-IMDB, UPMC Food101)

ChatDB: Augmenting LLMs with Databases as Their Symbolic Memory

Large language models (LLMs) with memory are computationally universal. However, mainstream LLMs are not taking full advantage of memory, and the designs are heavily influenced by biological brains. Due to their approximate nature and proneness to the accumulation of errors, conventional neural memory mechanisms cannot support LLMs to simulate complex reasoning. In this paper, we seek inspiration from modern computer architectures to augment LLMs with symbolic memory for complex multi-hop reasoning. Such a symbolic memory framework is instantiated as an LLM and a set of SQL databases, where the LLM generates SQL instructions to manipulate the SQL databases. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed memory framework on a synthetic dataset requiring complex reasoning. The project website is available at https://chatdatabase.github.io/

On Uni-Modal Feature Learning in Supervised Multi-Modal Learning

We abstract the features (i.e. learned representations) of multi-modal data into 1) uni-modal features, which can be learned from uni-modal training, and 2) paired features, which can only be learned from cross-modal interactions. Multi-modal models are expected to benefit from cross-modal interactions on the basis of ensuring uni-modal feature learning. However, recent supervised multi-modal late-fusion training approaches still suffer from insufficient learning of uni-modal features on each modality. We prove that this phenomenon does hurt the model's generalization ability. To this end, we propose to choose a targeted late-fusion learning method for the given supervised multi-modal task from Uni-Modal Ensemble(UME) and the proposed Uni-Modal Teacher(UMT), according to the distribution of uni-modal and paired features. We demonstrate that, under a simple guiding strategy, we can achieve comparable results to other complex late-fusion or intermediate-fusion methods on various multi-modal datasets, including VGG-Sound, Kinetics-400, UCF101, and ModelNet40

Intrinsically Motivated Self-supervised Learning in Reinforcement Learning

In vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, it is prevalent to assign auxiliary tasks with a surrogate self-supervised loss so as to obtain more semantic representations and improve sample efficiency. However, abundant information in self-supervised auxiliary tasks has been disregarded, since the representation learning part and the decision-making part are separated. To sufficiently utilize information in auxiliary tasks, we present a simple yet effective idea to employ self-supervised loss as an intrinsic reward, called Intrinsically Motivated Self-Supervised learning in Reinforcement learning (IM-SSR). We formally show that the self-supervised loss can be decomposed as exploration for novel states and robustness improvement from nuisance elimination. IM-SSR can be effortlessly plugged into any reinforcement learning with self-supervised auxiliary objectives with nearly no additional cost. Combined with IM-SSR, the previous underlying algorithms achieve salient improvements on both sample efficiency and generalization in various vision-based robotics tasks from the DeepMind Control Suite, especially when the reward signal is sparse