Multimodal Fusion

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Overview

Multimodal fusion studies how to combine inputs such as images, text, audio, medical scans, sensor streams, and structured records so models can use their complementary information. Common approaches include early or late fusion, cross-attention and contrastive alignment, and adaptive gates or mixtures of experts that weight modalities by task, sample, or estimated reliability. Methods are tested across settings such as BraTS medical segmentation, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI sentiment analysis, RGB-thermal detection, and clinical prediction, with growing attention to missing, noisy, or misaligned inputs. A central open tension is that additional modalities can help when they add useful evidence, but can also introduce noise or let a dominant modality suppress weaker ones; robust gains and generalization beyond benchmark conditions remain difficult to establish.

Latest papers

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772 papers73 papers in the last four weeks, down 12% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

Jun 29, 2026

Efficient RGB-T Object Detection via Sparse Cross-Modality Fusion

RGB-T detectors leverage the complementary strengths of visible and thermal infrared modalities, achieving robust performance under challenging conditions. Many of them resort to heavy dual backbones and exhaustive cross-modality fusion across the entire image, leading to impractically high computational costs. We observe that most image regions are smooth backgrounds (e.g., sky, ground) that can be easily handled by lightweight single-modality models. In light of this observation, we propose a sparse fusion mechanism for efficient RGB-T detection: first rapidly scanning the image to identify the proposals and then carefully examining the remaining sparse proposals via feature fusion. We propose a two-stage framework to instantiate this mechanism, which performs detection in two stages: 1) a lightweight and modality-specific detection stage that produces high-recall RoIs, and 2) a fusion-driven examination and refinement stage that filters out the false positives and refines the bounding boxes. This design enables the detector to adaptively allocate more computational resources to the potential foregrounds, improving the efficiency while ensuring detection accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves competitive performance with substantially fewer parameters and lower cost, while maintaining strong scalability to high-resolution images.

Chao Tian, Zikun Zhou, Chao Yang +2

Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

Multispectral Object DetectionEfficient Object DetectionObject DetectionMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 29, 2026

DAIN: Dynamic Agent-Based Interaction Network for Efficient and Collaborative Multimodal Reasoning

Current multimodal fusion approaches, particularly those based on static Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures, often struggle to provide the adaptive and efficient collaborative reasoning required by complex real-world applications. We introduce the Dynamic Agent-based Interaction Network (DAIN), which reconceptualizes multimodal fusion as a dynamic, multi-agent collaborative process. DAIN employs a context-aware Meta-Controller that dynamically schedules sparse activation of specialized interaction agents and orchestrates compressed inter-agent communication for consensus-building. The framework is guided by a multi-objective loss function that jointly optimizes task accuracy, agent specialization, and operational efficiency through sparse activation and communication regularization. Comprehensive evaluations across five diverse benchmarks -- ADNI, MIMIC-IV, MM-IMDB, CMU-MOSI, and ENRICO -- establish DAIN as a new state-of-the-art, delivering significant performance improvements including a 2.6% accuracy gain on ADNI. Ablation studies verify the critical roles of both dynamic scheduling and agent communication. Furthermore, DAIN offers enhanced interpretability by exposing context-dependent agent roles and collaboration patterns while maintaining computational efficiency through sample-wise sparse agent activation. Our work demonstrates the promise of dynamic, agent-based paradigms for multimodal reasoning.

Xinxin Chen, Yuchen Li, Zihan Wang +3

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Efficient Multimodal InferenceMulti-Agent CollaborationMultimodal ReasoningMultimodal AgentsMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 29, 2026

Cross-Modal Iteration Distillation for Robust IHD Screening: The IDNet Framework and A New Benchmark

Color Fundus Photography (CFP) offers a low-cost and non-invasive route for ischemic heart disease (IHD) screening, but current studies are limited by scarce public benchmarks and ineffective fusion of retinal images with sparse clinical variables. We propose IDNet, a multimodal framework with a Cross-Modal Distillation Aggregator (CDA) that uses learnable queries to sequentially integrate left-eye, right-eye, and clinical features, mitigating the imbalance between high-dimensional visual features and low-dimensional tabular inputs. We also construct a reproducible UK Biobank benchmark with open-source curation and quality-control pipelines, yielding 50,410 images from 25,205 subjects. On this benchmark, IDNet outperforms image-only, clinical-only, and several multimodal baselines, and CDA consistently improves multiple visual encoders as a plug-in fusion module.

Yongchang Gao, Junjie Pang, Shuaiyu Yang +5

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · MGI Tech Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China · Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China

Cross-Modal Knowledge DistillationMedical ImagingMultimodal ClassificationFundus ImagingMultimodal FusionMedical Image Benchmarks
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Jun 29, 2026

Traffic-CBM: A Structurally Interpretable Multimodal Framework for Encrypted Traffic Classification

Encrypted traffic classification has achieved strong performance, but its decision process remains difficult to interpret. Existing methods usually combine flow statistics, packet sequences, and byte-level representations into opaque latent features, making it unclear which type of evidence actually drives the prediction. In this paper, we propose Traffic-CBM, a structurally interpretable multimodal framework for encrypted traffic classification. Instead of directly fusing heterogeneous traffic signals into a black-box representation, Traffic-CBM organizes them into a unified hierarchical concept space. These concepts are not manually annotated semantic attributes; rather, they are scalar evidence summaries constrained by predefined traffic evidence groups. More specifically, grouped flow statistics are mapped to statistical concepts, dedicated temporal encoders learn temporal concepts from disjoint feature subspaces, and byte-level evidence is further organized into packet-level and cross-packet concepts. This design turns heterogeneous traffic evidence into an explicit concept representation and makes different levels of traffic evidence easier to analyze. We evaluate Traffic-CBM on multiple encrypted traffic benchmarks. Results show that it achieves competitive and balanced classification performance while providing a clearer structural interpretation interface than conventional end-to-end fusion models. Further analyses suggest that the learned concept space is actively used in the prediction process and provides a clearer structural explanation of multimodal traffic evidence.

Honglei Jin, Wenshuo Chen, Shaofeng Liang +6

HKUST (GZ) Guangzhou, China · Shandong University Qingdao, China

Encrypted Network Traffic AnalysisMultimodal ClassificationMultimodal Model InterpretabilityEncrypted Traffic ClassificationMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 29, 2026

LLM-based Multimodal Personality Recognition via Facial Action Unit-Text Semantic Fusion

Personality recognition in asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) has become increasingly important due to their widespread adoption in modern recruitment. Existing approaches often rely on large language models (LLMs) to analyze textual responses of interviewees in AVI. However, unimodel methods often suffer from information loss (e.g., ignore facial cues). In contrast, multimodal methods that employ full-face images or sparsely sampled frames can discard fine-grained temporal dynamics critical for accurate personality assessment. To overcome these limitations, we propose an LLM-based framework that semantically fuse facial action units (AUs) with textual responses of AVI. AU sequences are first converted into interpretable textual descriptions, which are then fused with participants' textual responses through an LLM. A lightweight regression head transforms the resulting embeddings into continuous personality scores without disrupting the underlying semantic space. Experiments on the AVI-6 benchmark demonstrate consistent improvements over most baselines, with lower prediction errors and stronger correlations with human-rated scores across multiple traits. Further analysis reveals that AU-derived semantic representations offer complementary non-verbal cues to textual responses. Decoupling semantic understanding from regression prediction within the LLM also leads to greater training stability and clearer interpretability. Overall, these findings demonstrate that AU-text fusion provides a psychologically grounded and computationally efficient framework for personality recognition in AVIs.

Tianyi Zhang, Wei Shan, Yuan Zong +2

Key Laboratory of Child Development and Learning Science (Ministry of Education), School of Biological Sciences and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

Multimodal FusionMultimodal Learning
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Jun 28, 2026

AMR: Adaptive Modality Routing for Multimodal Polyglot Speaker Identification

Multimodal speaker identification systems face two key challenges in real-world deployment: missing modalities and language mismatch between training and testing conditions. In practical scenarios, background multi-speaker conversations, ambient noise, and overlapping speech further degrade identification accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a multimodal polyglot speaker identification system for the POLY-SIM 2026 Grand Challenge. The system is fundamentally built upon Adaptive Modality Routing(AMR), a modality fusion module that dynamically assesses per-sample input quality and integrates modality information. Specifically, AMR employs two modality adapters to process the embeddings extracted from a linguistically robust audio encoder(W2V-BERT 2.0) and a large-scale pretrained face encoder(IResNet-18), producing modality-adapted embeddings. Based on these adapted embeddings, a trainable router estimates dynamic modality weights, which are subsequently applied to aggregate the modality-specific logits for the final prediction. To optimize this routing mechanism, we adopt a modality-aware training strategy that constructs four types of sample pairs to simulate diverse input conditions, with KL divergence serving as explicit supervision for weight assignment. Experimental results on the POLY-SIM 2026 evaluation set show that the proposed system achieves identification accuracy of 99.93%(English multimodal, P3), 100.00%(Urdu multimodal, P5), 97.50%(English audio-only, P4), and 98.83%(Urdu audio-only, P6). The average accuracy across all four protocols is 99.07%, surpassing the Fusion and Orthogonal Projection(FOP) baseline by 32.73%.

Chuxiao Zuo, Yao Zhu, Minqiang Xu +3

Honor Device Co., Ltd Nanjing, China · Honor Device Co., Ltd Shanghai, China

Multimodal RobustnessSpeech ProcessingMultimodal ClassificationMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 28, 2026

CMTFormer: Marrying Transformer with Hierarchical Information Interaction for RGB-Event Object Detection

Event cameras capture sparse brightness changes with high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, compensating for the deficiencies of the conventional RGB frames. However, previous multi-modal fusion techniques typically fail to handle the inherent heterogeneity between RGB frames and event streams, thus easily leading to noise amplification or redundant feature integration during cross-modal fusion. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Modal information inTeraction transFormer, coined as CMTFormer, which hierarchically integrates RGB and event information to achieve efficient and stable multimodal collaboration. Specifically, we design a shallow-to-deep information interaction scheme. In the shallow stage, we present the Shallow Alignment Module (SAM) to achieve an efficient fusion of RGB and event low-level features, which mitigates attribute disparities and prevents noisy information. In the middle stage, we devise the Cross-modal Enhancement Module (CEM) that utilizes texture and edge information to produce mutually reinforced middle-level features. In the deep stage, we present the Learnable Deep Fusion Module (LDFM) which performs high-level information aggregation through learnable weights, thus enabling the network to adaptively fuse RGB and event clues. A Spatial Prior Module is further designed to utilize global spatial information to enhance localization accuracy. Extensive experiments are conducted on two prevalent event-based object detection benchmarks, i.e., DSEC-Detection and PKU-DAVIS-SOD. Our CMTFormer consistently surpasses the detection counterparts in both uni-modal and multi-modal settings, strongly demonstrating the effectiveness of our paradigm. Codes will be available upon publication.

Yu Li, Yuenan Hou, Yingmei Wei +2

aLaboratory for Big Data and Decision, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan, China · bShanghai AI Laboratory, Shanghai, Shanghai, China

Event-Based VisionEvent-Based Object DetectionMultimodal FusionMultimodal Object DetectionRGB-Event Sensor Fusion
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Jun 26, 2026

A Comparison of Fusion Techniques for Multi-Modal Human Activity Recognition on the HARMES Dataset

Recent advances in Human Activity Recognition (HAR) from wearable sensors have shown that multi-modal deep learning models consistently outperform their uni-modal counterparts. Modalities can include IMUs, RGB cameras, audio signals, and others. One important aspect of multi-modal deep learning is the sensor fusion approach we apply. Over recent years, multiple fusion paradigms have been proposed for multi-modal HAR. However, to the best of our knowledge, no head-to-head comparison of these paradigms exists on a common multi-modal HAR benchmark dataset. To address this research gap, we systematically compare seven state-of-the-art sensor fusion methods on the recently released HARMES dataset, which comprises 61 hours of fully labeled IMU, audio, and ambient humidity data. The chosen dataset focuses on 15 household and personal hygiene activities of daily living (ADLs). By applying the seven different fusion techniques to a state-of-the-art multi-modal model architecture, we show that Gated Multi-modal Fusion achieves the highest macro F1-score (0.82), surpassing the concatenation-based late fusion HARMES paper baseline of 0.76 by +6pp under leave-one-participant-out evaluation. All code used in our experiments is made publicly available on GitHub.

Ahmed Mohamady, Robin Burchard, Kristof Van Laerhoven

University of Siegen, Germany

Gated Multimodal FusionHuman Activity RecognitionMultimodal FusionMultimodal Sensor Fusion
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Jun 26, 2026

S2^2-VLA: State-Space Guided Vision-Language-Action Models for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation, but their performance degrades significantly in long-horizon tasks due to cumulative error propagation. This limitation largely arises from static feature fusion mechanisms that rely on fixed weights to combine visual, language, and action representations, preventing the model from adapting to different phases of task execution. To address this limitation, we propose S2^2-VLA, a framework that introduces a State-Space Guided Adaptive Attention (SSGAA) mechanism. SSGAA maintains a belief state that tracks task progression and generates dynamic gating weights to adaptively fuse information from three complementary sources visual features for spatial perception, task intents for high-level task planning, and temporal action sequences for execution consistency. This adaptive fusion allows the model to shift its focus throughout task execution, aligning with the evolving requirements of different task stages. Despite its compact 2B parameter size, S2^2-VLA consistently outperforms larger 7B-scale models and achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-horizon manipulation benchmarks, including LIBERO and SimplerEnv. highlighting the importance of adaptive feature fusion for long-horizon robotic manipulation.

Zhipeng Xie, Zongyi Han, Xiangyi Wei +3

School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China · 2State Key Laboratory of Submarine Geoscience, School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationVision-Language-Action ModelsMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 26, 2026

Multi-Modal Conditioned High-Resolution Transformer for Urban Electromagnetic Field Map Prediction Download PDF

Predicting electromagnetic field (EMF) strength in urban environments is essential for cellular network planning but computationally expensive with physics-based simulators. We propose a multi-conditioned dense prediction framework that generates 500 500 EMF maps from building layout images and antenna configurations. Our architecture uses a High-Resolution Transformer (HRFormer) backbone with two complementary conditioning mechanisms: Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) injects scalar antenna parameters into all backbone stages, while cross-attention fuses 1-D radiation pattern tokens with spatial features at the deepest stage. We further introduce transmitter-relative spatial channels encoding distance, proximity, and bearing from the antenna, enabling coordinate-consistent test-time augmentation (TTA) that reduces test MAE by 6.3%. To address the prediction difficulty imbalance across EMF maps, we design a composite loss combining masked L1, multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM), and a focal L1 term that upweights high-signal pixels, outperforming individual loss components in all metrics. Our best model achieves a test MAE of 0.0461, a 25.2% improvement over a plain UNet baseline and 31.8% over an HRFormer-only baseline.Do-

Do-Eon Kim, Dongryul Park, Seungyoung Ahn +3

Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Republic of Korea · Cho Chun Shik Graduate School of Mobility, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34051, Republic of Korea · Department of Intelligent Semiconductors, Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Republic of Korea

TransformerWireless CommunicationsRadio Propagation ModelingMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 25, 2026

Modeling Local, Global, and Cross-Modal Context in Multimodal 3D MRI

Brain MRI poses a fundamental challenge for machine learning: models must learn from high-dimensional 3D data spanning multiple co-registered modalities, despite the limited sample sizes typical of neuroimaging studies relative to the diversity in anatomy, pathology, and acquisition conditions. While multimodal imaging provides complementary information critical for clinical interpretation, effectively integrating these signals remains difficult. We propose Multimodal Intra- and Cross-Context Vision Transformer (MICViT), a 3D vision transformer that explicitly models both modality-specific representations and cross-modal interactions across local and global contexts. Concretely, MICViT combines four attention mechanisms: modality-specific local and global attention for intra-modal feature learning, and cross-modal local and global attention to capture interactions between modalities. We evaluate MICViT on brain age prediction across three heterogeneous datasets (UK Biobank, n=41,404; SOOP, n=1,062; Cam-CAN, n=613) using multiple MRI modalities (e.g. T1, FLAIR, DWI, SWI). MICViT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CNN and transformer baselines in 3D settings. Notably, it benefits more strongly from multimodal inputs, yielding larger performance gains as additional modalities are incorporated. These results demonstrate that explicitly modeling intra- and cross-modal interactions is key to unlocking the full potential of multimodal brain MRI, highlighting a promising direction for representation learning in neuroimaging.

Minh Duc Do, Tillmann Rheude, Noel Kronenberg +2

1Berlin Institute of Health at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin · 2Health Data Science Unit, Heidelberg University Hospital and BioQuant · 3Intelligent Medicine Institute, Fudan University +1

3D ViTsBrain Age PredictionCross-Modal AttentionNeuroimagingMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 25, 2026

Liquid Fusion of Heterogeneous Representations Towards General Salient Object Detection

General Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to identify and segment visually interesting objects from uni-modality or multi-modality scenes, recently advanced by cutting-edge State Space Models (SSMs). However, a critical limitation of current approaches is their neglect of the inherent spectral biases exhibited by different neural network paradigms. By digging to the dataset-level spectral analysis of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and SSMs, their semantic representations are inherently complementary based on their complementary frequency preferences. Inspired by this, we harmonize heterogeneous representations from SSMs and CNNs to bridge their spectral biases for general salient object detection. To this end, inspired by the dynamic information propagation of Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs), we introduce a liquid fusion to dynamically integrates features from two backbones, including VMamba and ConvNeXt, referred to Liquid Fusion Network (LFNet). Concretely, by treating the continuous VMamba features and ConvNeXt features as evolving states and exogenous stimulus, respectively, LFNet employs a dynamic gating mechanism for content-aware feature aggregation. Crucially, this state-stimulus paradigm enables to scale to multi-modal cues, resulting in flexibility in general SOD. Besides, a Saliency-Guided Upsampling (SGU) operator to propagate the features to the shallow layer, which leverages a spectral-spatial co-design to suppress upsampling artifacts while preserving semantics. Extensive experiments across five diverse tasks (RGB, RGB-D, RGB-T, VSOD, and VDT) demonstrate that LFNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, offering a superior trade-off between detection accuracy and model efficiency. Code has been released at https://github.com/cke520/LFNet.

Ke Chen, Ling Zhou, Guangqi Jiang +3

School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Changzhou University, Changzhou, Jiangsu, 213159, China · College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200082, China · Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau, Avenida Padre Tomás Pereira2026 Taipa, Macao, 999078, China

Salient Object DetectionVisual SSMsObject DetectionMultimodal FusionFeature Fusion
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Jun 25, 2026

Multi-modality Image Fusion under Adverse Weather: Mask-Guided Feature Restoration and Interaction

Multi-modality image fusion (MMIF) enhances scene representation by exploiting complementary cues from different modalities. Adverse weather, however, causes significant image degradation, disrupting feature representation and requiring simultaneous feature restoration and cross-modal complementarity. Existing methods often struggle with effective representation learning under such conditions, limiting their practical performance. To address these challenges, we propose a mask-guided MMIF method that integrates feature restoration and interaction. We first introduce "Pseudo Ground Truth" to simplify training, promoting faster and more effective feature learning. Then, we design a mask generation mechanism based on the mapping relationship between the fused result and the source images, quantifying the relative contribution of each modality during the fusion process. By incorporating the proposed mask-guided cross-modal cross-attention mechanism, the network is encouraged to selectively attend to informative features during modality interaction, mitigating the risk of overfitting to the static distribution of the "Pseudo Ground Truth". Additionally, we propose a mask-guided learning strategy and a task-coupled degradation-aware learning strategy to balance feature restoration and interaction. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in visual quality, quantitative metrics, and downstream tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/ixilai/AMG-Fuse.

Xilai Li, Xiaosong Li, Haishu Tan +3

Foshan University, Foshan, China · China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing, China · Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China

Multi-Source Image FusionCross-Modal AttentionImage RestorationMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 25, 2026

When Does Quality-Aware Multimodal Fusion Matter? A Leakage-Safe Diagnostic for Decision-Level Dependence

Many multimodal systems estimate the reliability of each modality and weight their contributions to the final prediction. However, it remains unclear whether these scores influence model decisions or merely correlate with performance. We propose a simple diagnostic to test whether reliability information is used during inference. After training, the model and inputs are fixed while reliability scores are permuted across test examples. If predictions depend on these scores, performance should degrade. Experiments on StressID for stress recognition and CMU-MOSEI for sentiment analysis show that permuting reliability scores leaves performance unchanged despite substantial potential gains from selecting the best modality per example. In positive controls where reliability signals identify the correct modality, the same frozen fusion rules yield significant improvements, indicating that reliability signals influence fused decisions only when they reliably predict unimodal correctness.

Jaden Moon, Arvind Pillai, Andrew Campbell

Dartmouth College, United States

Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal FusionMultimodal FusionMultimodal Model EvaluationReliability-Aware Multimodal FusionModality Reliance in Multimodal ModelsData Fusion
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Jun 24, 2026

Methane-Plume Segmentation From Hyperspectral Satellite Imagery Via Multimodal Deep Learning

Efficient detection of methane plumes is crucial for understanding and mitigating global warming, as accurately identifying and segmenting them in earth observation imagery remain essential for large-scale monitoring. In this work, we propose a multimodal deep learning model that integrates a feature-guided methane enhancement (FGME) mechanism which injects physically meaningful methane cues into transformer-based RGB representations at multiple semantic scales. Our method is evaluated on the MPDataset, where it outperforms the state-of-the-art with improvements of +0.92 in MIoU, +0.87 in MPrecision and +1.01 in Recall. Notably, these gains are obtained with a substantially lower computational cost than other high-performing architectures, resulting in a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off for large-scale methane monitoring. These results highlight the potential of efficient multimodal fusion strategies for accurate and scalable methane plume segmentation in real-world remote sensing applications.

Brayan Quintero, Jeferson Acevedo, Samuel Traslaviña +1

Department of Computer Science, Universidad Industrial de Santander Bucaramanga, 680002, Colombia

Efficient Multimodal InferenceRemote Sensing Image SegmentationMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 24, 2026

SAC2^2-Net: Semantic Anchoring and Complementary-Consensus Fusion for Multimodal Micro-Expression Recognition

Micro-expression recognition (MER) is challenging due to subtle facial movements, limited data, and the ambiguous relationship between Action Units (AUs) and emotion categories. Optical flow and motion magnification are two widely used representations for making subtle facial dynamics observable. However, many existing methods treat them as separate cues or fuse them without explicitly modeling their dual complementarity. Optical flow encodes displacement-level muscle motion, whereas motion magnification reveals appearance-level changes in facial texture and context. When both modalities are informative, their combination provides a more complete characterization of subtle facial dynamics; when one modality degrades, the other may still preserve discriminative evidence for compensation. This dual complementarity provides richer facial representations, but also introduces two key challenges for multimodal fusion: cross-modal heterogeneity and spatially varying modality reliability. To address these challenges, we propose SAC2^2-Net, a Semantic Anchoring and Complementary-Consensus Network that first aligns heterogeneous visual representations with semantic anchors and then performs reliability-aware complementary fusion. Specifically, Semantic Anchoring Soft Alignment (SASA) converts activated AUs into textual prompts and uses hierarchical AU-aware soft labels to align motion-magnified and optical-flow representations while preserving semantic proximity among anatomically related samples. Based on the aligned representations, Complementary-Consensus Fusion (CCF) exchanges complementary motion and appearance cues, adaptively enhances unreliable local responses with trustworthy cross-modal evidence, and further encourages a shared spatial focus through consensus refinement.

Xuepeng Zheng, Tong Chen, Chaoping Gui +3

College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China · Faculty of psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China · Chongqing Key Laboratory of Generic Technology and System of Service Robots, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China +1

Cross-Modal AlignmentMultimodal Emotion RecognitionFacial Expression RecognitionMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 23, 2026

Multi-Stream Temporal Fusion for Financial Fraud Detection

Financial fraud detection in digital banking requires reasoning over multiple heterogeneous event streams -- transactions, login sessions, risk signals -- that individually appear benign but collectively reveal fraudulent patterns. We propose the Multi-Stream Fraud Transformer (MSFT), a unified architecture that encodes each event stream with independent Transformer encoders and fuses their representations through configurable mechanisms. We conduct a systematic ablation study comparing five fusion strategies: concatenation, gated fusion, time-aware positional encoding, cross-stream attention, and a full combination. On a large-scale dataset (10M users, 1.5% fraud rate) with 85M parameter models, we demonstrate that (1) sequence models significantly outperform gradient-boosted trees operating on aggregated features (0.74 vs. 0.99 AUROC), (2) per-stream encoding is essential -- a single-stream Transformer baseline with matched parameter budget reaches only 0.82 AUROC, an 18-point gap that confirms the multi-stream inductive bias is necessary, (3) time-aware positional encoding achieves the highest discrimination (0.9961 AUROC), (4) gated fusion yields the best precision (0.989) suitable for production deployment, and (5) the risk event stream provides the strongest individual signal contribution. We further validate on proprietary production data from a digital banking platform, showing over 22% relative AUROC improvement over the XGBoost baseline.

Mohammadamin Dashti Moghaddam, Nick Sciarrilli

Amazon Web Services

TransformerFinancial Fraud DetectionMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 23, 2026

Enhancing Clinician Decision-Making via Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Expert Fusion for Stroke Rehabilitation

Tailoring stroke rehabilitation requires assessing how movements are organized, not merely if they succeed. Currently, this assessment is a rate-limiting bottleneck. Instruments like the Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) compress rich behavioral observations into single ordinal endpoints, discarding the movement-quality details that distinguish recovery from compensation. Automated alternatives typically chase accuracy on noisy, single-observer labels to output opaque scores - a technology-centric approach that rarely reaches clinical practice. To address this, we present xAARA: an engine designed to augment rather than replace clinical judgment. From multi-view video, xAARA returns ARAT assessments with calibrated uncertainty and explanations across task, movement-phase, and movement-quality levels. Treating clinical scoring as an ill-posed inference problem, xAARA composes 692 calibrated multimodal models via a Dynamic Bayesian Network with entropy-based gating. It qualifies results against clinical validity rules and defers low-confidence cases. In 105 stroke survivors (788 exercises), xAARA achieved 94.2% task accuracy (Cohen's kappa=0.934) and 81.3% movement-phase accuracy (kappa=0.727), reducing predictive uncertainty by 96.1% compared to single-clinician scoring. For subjective cases, it matched at least one rater 100% of the time and never returned out-of-range scores. Four independent clinicians validated the assessments and indicated willingness to adopt the system. We argue that principled uncertainty quantification and clinician-aligned explainability are the critical bridges moving automated assessment from technical demonstration to a deployable clinical tool.

Tamim Ahmed, Thanassis Rikakis

Bioemdical Engineering, University of Soutehrn California,, Los Angeles, 90007, CA, USA.

Clinical Decision-MakingMultimodal Model InterpretabilityMultimodal FusionUncertainty Calibration
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Jun 23, 2026

Progressive Pixel-Neighborhood Deformable Cross-Attention for Multispectral Object Detection

Effective cross-modal feature alignment and interaction are central challenges in multispectral object detection. Although global cross-attention provides strong long-range modeling ability, its quadratic complexity with respect to feature size limits deployment on resource-constrained platforms. We therefore propose Progressive Pixel-Neighborhood Deformable Cross-Attention for multispectral feature fusion, termed PNAFusion. The proposed framework is motivated by two observations: weak misalignment between visible and thermal images is usually concentrated around local neighborhoods, and semantic correspondence across modalities often follows non-linear spatial mappings that fixed receptive fields cannot model well. To address these issues, PNAFusion incorporates local spatial priors into its architectural design to concentrate feature interaction and alignment on the most relevant neighborhoods. Specifically, a Pixel-Neighborhood Cross-Attention (PNCA) module is introduced to avoid redundant global feature matching and suppress background noise. Meanwhile, an Adaptive Deformable Alignment (ADA) module captures non-linear spatial correspondences through learned pixel-wise offsets. These components are further integrated through an iterative feedback mechanism to progressively refine cross-modal feature alignment. Experiments on FLIR, M3FD, and DroneVehicle show that PNAFusion achieves 84.2, 90.5, and 85.5 [email protected], respectively, under the YOLOv5 detector, and further reaches 86.8 [email protected] on FLIR and 90.8 [email protected] on M3FD when transferred to Co-DETR. Efficiency analysis indicates that PNAFusion reduces allocated GPU memory by 33.0% compared with ICAFusion and reduces theoretical FLOPs from 194.8 G to 156.4 G, although the deformable sampling and iterative refinement introduce additional latency. Our code will be available at https://github.com/DanielQiuTian/PNAFusion.

Tian Qiu, Jifeng Shen, Xin Zuo

School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, 212013, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang, 212003, China

Cross-Modal AttentionCross-Modal AlignmentTransformer AttentionMultispectral Object DetectionDeformable AttentionMultimodal Fusion+1
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Jun 20, 2026

Beyond Time Series: Spatial Reasoning for Epidemic Forecasting via Multimodal Learning

Epidemic forecasting models typically rely on surveillance data reported over administrative regions, treating them as atomic units, thereby obscuring sub-regional spatial structure that shapes disease dynamics. We introduce a spatially structured multimodal epidemic forecasting setting that integrates region-level temporal surveillance data with spatially localized auxiliary signals that are misaligned in resolution and structure, reflecting realistic public health reporting constraints. Building on this formulation, we propose M-SPICE (Multimodal SPatIal Context for Epidemic Forecasting), a structure-aware spatiotemporal forecasting framework that performs joint reasoning over temporal disease dynamics and spatial context via attention-based multimodal fusion, allowing spatial signals to selectively condition temporal representations across forecast horizons. We evaluate our approach on real-world COVID-19, influenza, and influenza-like illness (ILI) forecasting tasks under realistic real-time evaluation protocols. Across all forecasting settings, our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multivariate time-series, multimodal, and epidemiological forecasting baselines while maintaining strong probabilistic forecasting performance. Finally, interpretability analyses reveal when, where, and how spatial signals are leveraged, highlighting settings in which purely temporal, region-aggregated models are most likely to fail.

Diana Guadalupe Gomez, Chenwei Wu, Zhiyi Wang +2

University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Epidemic ForecastingSpatiotemporal ReasoningProbabilistic ForecastingSpatiotemporal ForecastingMultimodal FusionSpatial Epidemic Modeling
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Jun 20, 2026

A Controlled Study of CLIP-Based Body-Scene Fusion for Emotion Recognition in Context

Apparent emotion in natural images is often not visible from the face alone. The face may be small, hidden, or neutral, while posture and scene context carry much of the evidence. This work studies context-aware emotion recognition on EMOTIC with an image-only two-stream model. A ResNet-18 body stream encodes the target-person crop, and a CLIP ViT-B/16 scene stream encodes the full image. The fused feature predicts 26 categorical emotion labels and the continuous valence, arousal, and dominance values. This study examines whether small context-debiasing or rare-class training changes still help after adding a CLIP scene encoder. The clean two-stream model is compared with simplified CCIM-style intervention, CLEF-lite context-bias subtraction, ASL tuning, and class-balanced sampling under the same implementation pipeline. No tested variant improves over the clean two-stream model, which achieves 34.52% mAP on the EMOTIC test split. CLIP gives the model broad scene semantics, but the simplified causal, counterfactual, and rare-class changes do not automatically improve performance. Most remaining errors are in rare and subtle emotion categories, so the next step should focus on label relationships and finer subject-context interaction.

Zubair Abbas, Muhammad Umair, Muqaddas Hameed

Department of Computer Science, University of Central Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.

Multimodal FusionEmotion Recognition
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Jun 20, 2026

AgroSense 2.0: Cross-Modal Transformer Fusion with Geospatial Raster Integration and Interpretable Multi-Task Learning for Precision Crop Recommendation

Crop recommendation systems in precision agriculture have long suffered from a fundamental modality gap: visual soil characterization and chemical nutrient profiling are typically treated as independent inference problems, with fusion often reduced to late-stage feature concatenation. AgroSense2.0 addresses this limitation through three architectural advances. First, we introduce continental-scale geospatial integration via a seven-band soil raster (india\_soil\_7bands.tif) spanning India, encoding Nitrogen, pH, SOC, Clay, Sand, Silt, and Bulk Density as 32×3232\times32 spatial patches, a modality entirely absent from prior work. Second, we replace naive feature concatenation with a cross-modal Transformer fusion module, where tabular nutrient features attend over image representations via multi-head attention, enabling richer inter-modal dependency modeling than shallow fusion. Third, we adopt a multi-task objective jointly optimizing soil classification and crop recommendation through a shared backbone, improving generalization via complementary cross-task signal. To enhance interpretability, we apply TreeSHAP to the tabular branch, revealing crop-conditioned nutrient sensitivity: humidity and rainfall emerge as the most influential features globally, while crop-specific profiles diverge meaningfully rainfall dominates rice, nitrogen and potassium dominate maize, and humidity and nitrogen dominate coffee. These explanations provide transparency into model decisions and surface both agronomically consistent patterns and dataset-specific divergences worth further study. Together, these contributions establish AgroSense2.0 as a more principled, interpretable, and geospatially grounded framework for precision agriculture.

Vishal Pandey, Rishav Tewari, Ruzina Haque Laskar

Research Engineer London, UK · Independent Researcher Kolkata, IN · Scientist-B Centre for Development of Telematics Delhi, IN

Multimodal FusionPrecision Agriculture
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Jun 19, 2026

Bridging the Age Gap: Towards Detecting Neural Audio Codec Synthesized Elderly Speech Deepfake

In this study, we introduce the Elderly CodecFake Detection (ECFD) task and release the Elderly-CodecFake (ECF) dataset in English and Chinese. We show that state-of-the-art CF detectors trained on previous benchmark CF datasets generalize poorly to elderly speech, revealing a critical vulnerability. We further hypothesize and demonstrate that multimodal foundation models (FMs) such as LanguageBind (LB) and ImageBind (IB) are more effective for ECFD due to their exposure to elderly content during cross-modal pretraining. Motivated by prior evidence that fusion of FMs enhances downstream performance, we explore fusion of FMs for ECFD. To this end, we propose BONSAI, a novel framework that employs Jensen-Shannon Divergence as the fusion mechanism. BONSAI with the fusion of LB and IB achieves an average EER (%) of 1.66 and outperforms individual FMs as well as competitive SOTA baselines, establishing a new benchmark for the ECFD task.

Orchid Chetia Phukan, Girish, Mohd Mujtaba Akhtar +1

BIIC Lab, NTHU, Taiwan

Audio Deepfake DetectionDeepfake DetectionMultimodal Foundation ModelsMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 19, 2026

A Hybrid, Multi-Layered Pipeline for Phishing and Threat Classification: Independently Validated URL and NLP Engines with a Calibrated Multi-Channel Fusion Stage

Phishing is a multi-modal threat. We present a hybrid pipeline that scores each modality with its own engine and fuses the results. Three engines are built, deployed, and independently benchmarked: a four-stage URL stack (Domain Guard, lexical model, threat intelligence, and an asymmetric L2 fusion sidecar); a generalization-hardened DistilBERT NLP classifier whose held-out real-phishing recall rises from 0.8% to 87.3%; and a threat-intelligence synchronizer with end-to-end OpenTelemetry instrumentation confirming 1:1 message conservation. A decision-level fusion stage, characterized on a 10,677-email whole-system benchmark, reaches F1=0.914 with a calibrated probabilistic-OR over URL, header, and phishing-probability channels while reducing held-out real-spam false positives to 3.6%. Because that benchmark uses proxy URL and header channels and an operating point still needing recalibration, we present it as a preliminary integrated result. For deployable detection, the limiting factor is how well a model generalizes, not how accurately it scores data drawn from its own training distribution.

Saifelden M. Ismail, Aser O. Ibrahim, Omar A. Mahmoud

Department of Communications and Information Engineering Zewail City of Science and Technology, Giza, Egypt

Phishing DetectionMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 19, 2026

EnTrust: Modeling Inter-Modal Conflict for Trustworthy Multimodal Medical Image Analysis

Multimodal medical imaging fuses complementary anatomical and functional information, yet modalities frequently disagree in pathologically heterogeneous regions. Current segmentation models handle this in one of two inadequate ways: deterministic fusion that averages away disagreement, or post-hoc uncertainty estimation decoupled from the fusion process that produces it. Both obscure the clinically critical question: why is this prediction unreliable? We present EnTrust, a framework that treats inter-modal conflict as the primary source of predictive uncertainty. Our EnFuse module decomposes multimodal features into three disentangled components: shared anatomical consensus (F_c), modality-specific cues (F_{u,m}), and spatially localized conflict signals (F_{cf}), with independence enforced via a cross-covariance objective. This structured decomposition conditions SegDiff, a diffusion-based generative segmentation model whose sampled hypotheses diverge specifically in regions of modal disagreement. TrustMap then translates this hypothesis divergence into calibrated, pixel-wise uncertainty using ensemble entropy, conflict-guided perturbation probing, and a learned calibration head, enabling clinicians to understand not only where predictions are uncertain, but why. Across four benchmarks spanning brain, cardiac, lesion, and oncology domains, EnTrust achieves state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy while reducing calibration error by 40% compared to the strongest baseline. Notably, it outperforms 5x deep ensembles using a single model at roughly half the memory footprint. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/GenMI-Lab/EnTrust.git.

Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Abhijit Das, Behzad Bozorgtabar +5

Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE. · MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE. · Aarhus University, Denmark. +5

Cross-Modality Medical Image SegmentationDiffusion Models for Medical Image SegmentationUncertainty-Aware Multimodal FusionMedical Image SegmentationExplainable Medical Image AnalysisSegmentation Uncertainty Estimation+1
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Jun 19, 2026

Demographic Metadata as Construct-Irrelevant Noise in DistilBERT-Based Automated Essay Scoring

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems are increasingly used to support teachers in managing grading workloads and to provide a supplementary rater in large-scale assessments. While human grading is frequently influenced by students' demographic characteristics, the efficacy of different strategies for integrating demographic metadata with textual input used to train AES models remains underexplored. This study investigates the impact of a specific multimodal fusion strategy - naive metadata concatenation - on the predictive accuracy, training convergence, and score parity of a DistilBERT-based AES model. A comparative analysis was conducted using the ASAP 2.0 dataset to evaluate a baseline model against an experimental model trained with input that concatenates tokenised text and demographic metadata using a naive multimodal fusion strategy. Evaluated via 10-fold cross-validation, the findings reveal that the early fusion of demographic metadata and the input significantly degrades the model's overall predictive accuracy. The baseline model achieved a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of 0.727, which dropped to 0.656 upon integrating metadata. Furthermore, the experimental model exhibited higher validation loss (1.29) compared to the baseline model (1.25). The experimental model also displayed exacerbated scoring bias, reducing score parity instances from 15 to 12 out of 19 tests.

Teik Peng Ch'ng, Hui Na Chua

Sunway University School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Sunway University, Malaysia

Automated Essay ScoringDemographic Bias in Language ModelsMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 18, 2026

Towards Modality-imbalanced Federated Graph Learning: A Data Synthesis-based Approach

MultiModal Federated Graph Learning (MM-FGL) offers a natural collaborative training paradigm, but its practical deployment is challenged by two granularities of modality imbalance. Client-level imbalance occurs when certain clients lack entire modalities, while node-level imbalance occurs when individual nodes exhibit missing visual or textual attributes. While several relevant studies exist, our investigation reveals that they predominantly target graph-agnostic or centralized scenarios, rendering them difficult to adapt directly. To address these challenges, we formalize modality-imbalanced MM-FGL as an implicit graph-aware latent semantic representation synthesis problem. This paradigm recovers missing modal semantics directly within the representation space, thereby maximizing alignment with the original data's semantic distribution and mitigating the high variance induced by missing modalities. To this end, we propose FedMGS (Federated Modality-aware Graph Synthesis), which integrates three core components. The availability-aware graph encoder prevents missing modalities from contaminating local structural propagation. The prototype-guided latent semantic synthesizer establishes cross-client semantic anchors for unavailable modalities. The reliability-calibrated semantic fusion mechanism regulates the impact of recovered latent representations prior to predictive readout. Extensive experiments on four tasks show that FedMGS consistently outperforms competitive baselines with gains up to 17.41% with best efficiency-performance tradeoff.

Zhengyu Wu, Hongchao Qin, Xunkai Li +3

Multimodal Federated LearningMissing-Modality LearningFederated Graph LearningMultimodal Graph LearningMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 18, 2026

Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis using a Multimodal Approach with 3D MRI and PET

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an irreversible neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of death worldwide. Early diagnosis plays an important part especially at the Mild Cognitive Impairment stage, where timely intervention can help slow its progression before it advances to AD. Neuroimaging data, like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, can help detect brain changes early by providing structural and functional brain changes related to the disease. Yet, many multimodal models still fuse MRI and PET with static concatenation and apply identical computation to all subjects, which limits robustness to patient/site heterogeneity and can waste computation. To address these limitations, we present the first study of combining 3D convolutional feature extractors with three fusion strategies - concatenation, Gated Multimodal Unit (GMU), and gated self-attention - and a sparsely gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) classifier that performs input-adaptive routing, activating only the most informative experts per case. Finally, we utilize Grad-CAM to visualize disease-related regions, ensuring model interpretability. Experiments are performed across three binary classification tasks (NC vs. MCI, MCI vs. AD, and NC vs. AD). Results show that GMU achieves accuracies of 80.46 % (NC vs. MCI) and 95.47 % (NC vs. AD), while gated self-attention attains 82.08 % on MCI vs. AD. Ablations show that removing the MoE consistently degrades accuracy across all tasks. These findings underscore the value of input-adaptive, multimodal modeling for AD diagnosis by leveraging the complementary nature of MRI and PET.

Loukas Ilias, Anthi-Maria Vozinaki, Christos Ntanos +1

DSS Lab, School of ECE, NTUA, 15780 Athens, Greece

Medical Diagnosis3D Medical ImagingMultimodal ClassificationMedical Image ClassificationAlzheimer's Disease ClassificationMultimodal Fusion
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Jun 18, 2026

Evidential Fusion Network for Multimodal Survival Prediction under Missing Modalities

Recent multimodal survival prediction models have demonstrated strong predictive performance by leveraging complementary information across modalities. However, such models generally assume data completeness and exhibit limited robustness toward missing modalities, which are frequently encountered in real-world clinical settings. We propose the Evidential Missing Modality Survival Fusion (EMMS) model for multimodal survival prediction under missing modalities. EMMS offers a straightforward, computationally effective approach to survival analysis without requiring a generative phase for missing data. By employing Dempster-Shafer theory and Gaussian Random Fuzzy Numbers for multimodal decision fusion, it considers both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty alongside modality reliability for fusion. Moreover, the model treats missing modalities as vacuous evidence, preventing interference with available inputs and naturally reflecting increased uncertainty and calibrated predictions. Extensive experiments on four cancer datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance while providing calibrated and interpretable uncertainty estimates under incomplete multimodal observations, without introducing additional computational overhead.

Yucheng Xing, Hailan Mo, Zi Wang +2

National University of Singapore, Singapore · Imperial College London, London, UK

Missing-Modality LearningUncertainty QuantificationCancer Survival PredictionSurvival AnalysisDempster-Shafer TheoryUncertainty-Aware Multimodal Fusion+3
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Jun 18, 2026

Vortex: Multi-Modal Fusion System for Intelligent Video Retrieval

This paper presents Vortex, the multimodal video retrieval system developed by our team, FocusOnFun, for the Ho Chi Minh City AI Challenge 2025, designed to advance intelligent multimedia search and temporal reasoning. The system integrates adaptive keyframe extraction, multimodal metadata generation from vision-language and speech models, and a hybrid retrieval strategy that fuses CLIP and SigLIP2 embeddings through Reciprocal Rank Fusion to balance global and fine-grained semantics. To enhance interactivity, Vortex incorporates Rocchio-based relevance feedback and a multi-stage temporal search mechanism for sequential event alignment. Built on Milvus and Elasticsearch, the architecture enables scalable indexing and efficient retrieval. Evaluated in the official competition, our FocusOnFun team's system achieved a score of 79.6/88 (90.5%) in the Preliminary Round and was further evaluated in the Final Round, achieving an Excellent' overall performance with Outstanding' results in the question-answering (QA) task. This demonstrating the complementary strengths of CLIP and SigLIP2 and confirming the effectiveness of the hybrid retrieval approach. The system establishes a robust foundation for future research in intelligent, context-aware, and interactive video retrieval.

Duc-Tho Nguyen, Hieu-Hoc Tran-Minh, Khanh-Hoa Lam +4

University of Science, VNU-HCM, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Multimodal IRInformation RetrievalHybrid RetrievalMultimodal FusionVideo Retrieval
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