skip to main content


Title: Learning Factorized Multimodal Representations
Learning multimodal representations is a fundamentally complex research problem due to the presence of multiple heterogeneous sources of information. Although the presence of multiple modalities provides additional valuable information, there are two key challenges to address when learning from multimodal data: 1) models must learn the complex intra-modal and cross-modal interactions for prediction and 2) models must be robust to unexpected missing or noisy modalities during testing. In this paper, we propose to optimize for a joint generative-discriminative objective across multimodal data and labels. We introduce a model that factorizes representations into two sets of independent factors: multimodal discriminative and modality-specific generative factors. Multimodal discriminative factors are shared across all modalities and contain joint multimodal features required for discriminative tasks such as sentiment prediction. Modality-specific generative factors are unique for each modality and contain the information required for generating data. Experimental results show that our model is able to learn meaningful multimodal representations that achieve state-of-the-art or competitive performance on six multimodal datasets. Our model demonstrates flexible generative capabilities by conditioning on independent factors and can reconstruct missing modalities without significantly impacting performance. Lastly, we interpret our factorized representations to understand the interactions that influence multimodal learning.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1750439 1722822
NSF-PAR ID:
10099431
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Representation Learning
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Multimodal sentiment analysis is a core research area that studies speaker sentiment expressed from the language, visual, and acoustic modalities. The central challenge in multimodal learning involves inferring joint representations that can process and relate information from these modalities. However, existing work learns joint representations by requiring all modalities as input and as a result, the learned representations may be sensitive to noisy or missing modalities at test time. With the recent success of sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) models in machine translation, there is an opportunity to explore new ways of learning joint representations that may not require all input modalities at test time. In this paper, we propose a method to learn robust joint representations by translating between modalities. Our method is based on the key insight that translation from a source to a target modality provides a method of learning joint representations using only the source modality as input. We augment modality translations with a cycle consistency loss to ensure that our joint representations retain maximal information from all modalities. Once our translation model is trained with paired multimodal data, we only need data from the source modality at test time for final sentiment prediction. This ensures that our model remains robust from perturbations or missing information in the other modalities. We train our model with a coupled translationprediction objective and it achieves new state-of-the-art results on multimodal sentiment analysis datasets: CMU-MOSI, ICTMMMO, and YouTube. Additional experiments show that our model learns increasingly discriminative joint representations with more input modalities while maintaining robustness to missing or perturbed modalities. 
    more » « less
  2. Abstract Background

    Genotypes are strongly associated with disease phenotypes, particularly in brain disorders. However, the molecular and cellular mechanisms behind this association remain elusive. With emerging multimodal data for these mechanisms, machine learning methods can be applied for phenotype prediction at different scales, but due to the black-box nature of machine learning, integrating these modalities and interpreting biological mechanisms can be challenging. Additionally, the partial availability of these multimodal data presents a challenge in developing these predictive models.

    Method

    To address these challenges, we developed DeepGAMI, an interpretable neural network model to improve genotype–phenotype prediction from multimodal data. DeepGAMI leverages functional genomic information, such as eQTLs and gene regulation, to guide neural network connections. Additionally, it includes an auxiliary learning layer for cross-modal imputation allowing the imputation of latent features of missing modalities and thus predicting phenotypes from a single modality. Finally, DeepGAMI uses integrated gradient to prioritize multimodal features for various phenotypes.

    Results

    We applied DeepGAMI to several multimodal datasets including genotype and bulk and cell-type gene expression data in brain diseases, and gene expression and electrophysiology data of mouse neuronal cells. Using cross-validation and independent validation, DeepGAMI outperformed existing methods for classifying disease types, and cellular and clinical phenotypes, even using single modalities (e.g., AUC score of 0.79 for Schizophrenia and 0.73 for cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease).

    Conclusion

    We demonstrated that DeepGAMI improves phenotype prediction and prioritizes phenotypic features and networks in multiple multimodal datasets in complex brains and brain diseases. Also, it prioritized disease-associated variants, genes, and regulatory networks linked to different phenotypes, providing novel insights into the interpretation of gene regulatory mechanisms. DeepGAMI is open-source and available for general use.

     
    more » « less
  3. Abstract

    In the era of big data, where vast amounts of information are being generated and collected at an unprecedented rate, there is a pressing demand for innovative data-driven multi-modal fusion methods. These methods aim to integrate diverse neuroimaging perspectives to extract meaningful insights and attain a more comprehensive understanding of complex psychiatric disorders. However, analyzing each modality separately may only reveal partial insights or miss out on important correlations between different types of data. This is where data-driven multi-modal fusion techniques come into play. By combining information from multiple modalities in a synergistic manner, these methods enable us to uncover hidden patterns and relationships that would otherwise remain unnoticed. In this paper, we present an extensive overview of data-driven multimodal fusion approaches with or without prior information, with specific emphasis on canonical correlation analysis and independent component analysis. The applications of such fusion methods are wide-ranging and allow us to incorporate multiple factors such as genetics, environment, cognition, and treatment outcomes across various brain disorders. After summarizing the diverse neuropsychiatric magnetic resonance imaging fusion applications, we further discuss the emerging neuroimaging analyzing trends in big data, such as N-way multimodal fusion, deep learning approaches, and clinical translation. Overall, multimodal fusion emerges as an imperative approach providing valuable insights into the underlying neural basis of mental disorders, which can uncover subtle abnormalities or potential biomarkers that may benefit targeted treatments and personalized medical interventions.

     
    more » « less
  4. In this paper, we propose a deep multimodal fusion network to fuse multiple modalities (face, iris, and fingerprint) for person identification. The proposed deep multimodal fusion algorithm consists of multiple streams of modality-specific Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which are jointly optimized at multiple feature abstraction levels. Multiple features are extracted at several different convolutional layers from each modality-specific CNN for joint feature fusion, optimization, and classification. Features extracted at different convolutional layers of a modality-specific CNN represent the input at several different levels of abstract representations. We demonstrate that an efficient multimodal classification can be accomplished with a significant reduction in the number of network parameters by exploiting these multi-level abstract representations extracted from all the modality-specific CNNs. We demonstrate an increase in multimodal person identification performance by utilizing the proposed multi-level feature abstract representations in our multimodal fusion, rather than using only the features from the last layer of each modality-specific CNNs. We show that our deep multi-modal CNNs with multimodal fusion at several different feature level abstraction can significantly outperform the unimodal representation accuracy. We also demonstrate that the joint optimization of all the modality-specific CNNs excels the score and decision level fusions of independently optimized CNNs. 
    more » « less
  5. Representation learning is a challenging, but essential task in audiovisual learning. A key challenge is to generate strong cross-modal representations while still capturing discriminative information contained in unimodal features. Properly capturing this information is important to increase accuracy and robustness in audio-visual tasks. Focusing on emotion recognition, this study proposes novel cross-modal ladder networks to capture modality-specific in-formation while building strong cross-modal representations. Our method utilizes representations from a backbone network to implement unsupervised auxiliary tasks to reconstruct intermediate layer representations across the acoustic and visual networks. The skip connections between the cross-modal encoder and decoder provide powerful modality-specific and multimodal representations for emotion recognition. Our model on the CREMA-D corpus achieves high performance with precision, recall, and F1 scores over 80% on a six-class problem. 
    more » « less