Do More Modalities Always Help? A Geometric Perspective on Missing-Modality Robustness
Missing modality remains a longstanding challenge in multimodal learning. Existing methods typically address this issue through modality recovery or adaptive strategies. However, they overlook models' internal cross-modal dependencies formed during multimodal training, which later impair robustness. We systematically characterize a counterintuitive deployment-time failure mode: models trained on full modalities can underperform unimodal models when one modality is missing at inference time. This pattern appears across diverse architectures, such as fusion models, CLIP-style two-tower models, and vision-language models. We show that such degradation is closely associated with learned cross...
| Authors | Songyuan Sui, Zhen Tan, Mohan Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 3 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
Popularity, last 3 days
0 now. Counts as reported by the source, snapshotted daily by Silytics.
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 18 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.