Dependency, Compression, and Synergy: A Unified Information-Theoretic View of Multimodal Learning
Recent advances in multimodal foundation models have intensified the need to understand how different modalities share, preserve, and complement information. Mutual Information (MI), the Information Bottleneck (IB), and Partial Information Decomposition (PID) provide complementary perspectives, yet existing studies often treat them as isolated tools. This survey presents an information-theoretic perspective connecting these principles as progressively refined views of multimodal information processing: MI characterizes inter-modal dependency, IB explains task-oriented information preservation under compression, and PID decomposes preserved information into redundancy, uniqueness, and syne...
| Authors | Liangjian Wen, Linjie Li, Jiang Duan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IT |
| Published | 13 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 September 2026 |
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