Yake Wei

Xiaokang Peng, Yake Wei, Andong Deng et al.

Multimodal learning helps to comprehensively understand the world, by integrating different senses. Accordingly, multiple input modalities are expected to boost model performance, but we actually find that they are not fully exploited even when the multimodal model outperforms its uni-modal counterpart. Specifically, in this paper we point out that existing multimodal discriminative models, in which uniform objective is designed for all modalities, could remain under-optimized uni-modal representations, caused by another dominated modality in some scenarios, e.g., sound in blowing wind event, vision in drawing picture event, etc. To alleviate this optimization imbalance, we propose on-the-fly gradient modulation to adaptively control the optimization of each modality, via monitoring the discrepancy of their contribution towards the learning objective. Further, an extra Gaussian noise that changes dynamically is introduced to avoid possible generalization drop caused by gradient modulation. As a result, we achieve considerable improvement over common fusion methods on different multimodal tasks, and this simple strategy can also boost existing multimodal methods, which illustrates its efficacy and versatility. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/OGM-GE_CVPR2022}.

Guangyao Li, Yake Wei, Yapeng Tian et al.

In this paper, we focus on the Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) task, which aims to answer questions regarding different visual objects, sounds, and their associations in videos. The problem requires comprehensive multimodal understanding and spatio-temporal reasoning over audio-visual scenes. To benchmark this task and facilitate our study, we introduce a large-scale MUSIC-AVQA dataset, which contains more than 45K question-answer pairs covering 33 different question templates spanning over different modalities and question types. We develop several baselines and introduce a spatio-temporal grounded audio-visual network for the AVQA problem. Our results demonstrate that AVQA benefits from multisensory perception and our model outperforms recent A-, V-, and AVQA approaches. We believe that our built dataset has the potential to serve as testbed for evaluating and promoting progress in audio-visual scene understanding and spatio-temporal reasoning. Code and dataset: http://gewu-lab.github.io/MUSIC-AVQA/

Yake Wei, Ruoxuan Feng, Zihe Wang et al.

One primary topic of multimodal learning is to jointly incorporate heterogeneous information from different modalities. However most models often suffer from unsatisfactory multimodal cooperation which cannot jointly utilize all modalities well. Some methods are proposed to identify and enhance the worse learnt modality but they are often hard to provide the fine-grained observation of multimodal cooperation at sample-level with theoretical support. Hence it is essential to reasonably observe and improve the fine-grained cooperation between modalities especially when facing realistic scenarios where the modality discrepancy could vary across different samples. To this end we introduce a sample-level modality valuation metric to evaluate the contribution of each modality for each sample. Via modality valuation we observe that modality discrepancy indeed could be different at sample-level beyond the global contribution discrepancy at dataset-level. We further analyze this issue and improve cooperation between modalities at sample-level by enhancing the discriminative ability of low-contributing modalities in a targeted manner. Overall our methods reasonably observe the fine-grained uni-modal contribution and achieve considerable improvement. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Valuate-and-Enhance-Multimodal-Cooperation.

Yake Wei, Siwei Li, Ruoxuan Feng et al.

To overcome the imbalanced multimodal learning problem, where models prefer the training of specific modalities, existing methods propose to control the training of uni-modal encoders from different perspectives, taking the inter-modal performance discrepancy as the basis. However, the intrinsic limitation of modality capacity is ignored. The scarcely informative modalities can be recognized as ``worse-learnt'' ones, which could force the model to memorize more noise, counterproductively affecting the multimodal model ability. Moreover, the current modality modulation methods narrowly concentrate on selected worse-learnt modalities, even suppressing the training of others. Hence, it is essential to consider the intrinsic limitation of modality capacity and take all modalities into account during balancing. To this end, we propose the Diagnosing \& Re-learning method. The learning state of each modality is firstly estimated based on the separability of its uni-modal representation space, and then used to softly re-initialize the corresponding uni-modal encoder. In this way, the over-emphasizing of scarcely informative modalities is avoided. In addition, encoders of worse-learnt modalities are enhanced, simultaneously avoiding the over-training of other modalities. Accordingly, multimodal learning is effectively balanced and enhanced. Experiments covering multiple types of modalities and multimodal frameworks demonstrate the superior performance of our simple-yet-effective method for balanced multimodal learning. The source code and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Diagnosing_Relearning_ECCV2024}.

Yake Wei, Di Hu, Yapeng Tian et al.

Sight and hearing are two senses that play a vital role in human communication and scene understanding. To mimic human perception ability, audio-visual learning, aimed at developing computational approaches to learn from both audio and visual modalities, has been a flourishing field in recent years. A comprehensive survey that can systematically organize and analyze studies of the audio-visual field is expected. Starting from the analysis of audio-visual cognition foundations, we introduce several key findings that have inspired our computational studies. Then, we systematically review the recent audio-visual learning studies and divide them into three categories: audio-visual boosting, cross-modal perception and audio-visual collaboration. Through our analysis, we discover that, the consistency of audio-visual data across semantic, spatial and temporal support the above studies. To revisit the current development of the audio-visual learning field from a more macro view, we further propose a new perspective on audio-visual scene understanding, then discuss and analyze the feasible future direction of the audio-visual learning area. Overall, this survey reviews and outlooks the current audio-visual learning field from different aspects. We hope it can provide researchers with a better understanding of this area. A website including constantly-updated survey is released: \url{https://gewu-lab.github.io/audio-visual-learning/}.

Yu Miao, Zequn Yang, Yake Wei et al. · pku

In different multimodal scenarios, it needs to integrate and utilize information across modalities in a specific way based on the demands of the task. Different integration ways between modalities are referred to as "multimodal interaction". How well a model handles various multimodal interactions largely characterizes its multimodal ability. In this paper, we introduce MIBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the multimodal interaction capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), which formulates each instance as a (con_v , con_t, task) triplet with contexts from vision and text, necessitating that LMMs employ correct forms of multimodal interaction to effectively complete the task. MIBench assesses models from three key aspects: the ability to source information from vision-centric or text-centric cues, and the ability to generate new information from their joint synergy. Each interaction capability is evaluated hierarchically across three cognitive levels: Recognition, Understanding, and Reasoning. MIBench comprises over 10,000 vision-text context pairs spanning 32 distinct tasks. Evaluation of state-of-the-art LMMs show that: (1) LMMs' ability on multimodal interaction remains constrained, despite the scaling of model parameters and training data; (2) they are easily distracted by textual modalities when processing vision information; (3) they mostly possess a basic capacity for multimodal synergy; and (4) natively trained multimodal models show noticeable deficits in fundamental interaction ability. We expect that these observations can serve as a reference for developing LMMs with more enhanced multimodal ability in the future.

Yake Wei, Di Hu, Henghui Du et al.

Multimodal learning is expected to boost model performance by integrating information from different modalities. However, its potential is not fully exploited because the widely-used joint training strategy, which has a uniform objective for all modalities, leads to imbalanced and under-optimized uni-modal representations. Specifically, we point out that there often exists modality with more discriminative information, e.g., vision of playing football and sound of blowing wind. They could dominate the joint training process, resulting in other modalities being significantly under-optimized. To alleviate this problem, we first analyze the under-optimized phenomenon from both the feed-forward and the back-propagation stages during optimization. Then, On-the-fly Prediction Modulation (OPM) and On-the-fly Gradient Modulation (OGM) strategies are proposed to modulate the optimization of each modality, by monitoring the discriminative discrepancy between modalities during training. Concretely, OPM weakens the influence of the dominant modality by dropping its feature with dynamical probability in the feed-forward stage, while OGM mitigates its gradient in the back-propagation stage. In experiments, our methods demonstrate considerable improvement across a variety of multimodal tasks. These simple yet effective strategies not only enhance performance in vanilla and task-oriented multimodal models, but also in more complex multimodal tasks, showcasing their effectiveness and flexibility. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/BML_TPAMI2024}.

Chengxiang Huang, Yake Wei, Zequn Yang et al.

Sensory training during the early ages is vital for human development. Inspired by this cognitive phenomenon, we observe that the early training stage is also important for the multimodal learning process, where dataset information is rapidly acquired. We refer to this stage as the prime learning window. However, based on our observation, this prime learning window in multimodal learning is often dominated by information-sufficient modalities, which in turn suppresses the information acquisition of information-insufficient modalities. To address this issue, we propose Information Acquisition Regulation (InfoReg), a method designed to balance information acquisition among modalities. Specifically, InfoReg slows down the information acquisition process of information-sufficient modalities during the prime learning window, which could promote information acquisition of information-insufficient modalities. This regulation enables a more balanced learning process and improves the overall performance of the multimodal network. Experiments show that InfoReg outperforms related multimodal imbalanced methods across various datasets, achieving superior model performance. The code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/InfoReg_CVPR2025.

Ruotian Peng, Haiying He, Yake Wei et al.

High-quality image captions play a crucial role in improving the performance of cross-modal applications such as text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, and text-image retrieval. To generate long-form, high-quality captions, many recent studies have employed multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current MLLMs often produce captions that lack fine-grained details or suffer from hallucinations, a challenge that persists in both open-source and closed-source models. Inspired by Feature-Integration theory, which suggests that attention must focus on specific regions to integrate visual information effectively, we propose a \textbf{divide-then-aggregate} strategy. Our method first divides the image into semantic and spatial patches to extract fine-grained details, enhancing the model's local perception of the image. These local details are then hierarchically aggregated to generate a comprehensive global description. To address hallucinations and inconsistencies in the generated captions, we apply a semantic-level filtering process during hierarchical aggregation. This training-free pipeline can be applied to both open-source models (LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-1.6, Mini-Gemini) and closed-source models (Claude-3.5-Sonnet, GPT-4o, GLM-4V-Plus). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates more detailed, reliable captions, advancing multimodal description generation without requiring model retraining. The source code are available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Patch-Matters

Haotian Ni, Yake Wei, Hang Liu et al.

Multimodal learning faces challenges in effectively fusing information from diverse modalities, especially when modality quality varies across samples. Dynamic fusion strategies, such as attention mechanism in Transformers, aim to address such challenge by adaptively emphasizing modalities based on the characteristics of input data. However, through amounts of carefully designed experiments, we surprisingly observed that the dynamic adaptability of widely-used self-attention models diminishes. Model tends to prefer one modality regardless of data characteristics. This bias triggers a self-reinforcing cycle that progressively overemphasizes the favored modality, widening the distribution gap in attention keys across modalities and deactivating attention mechanism's dynamic properties. To revive adaptability, we propose a simple yet effective method Rolling Query (RollingQ), which balances attention allocation by rotating the query to break the self-reinforcing cycle and mitigate the key distribution gap. Extensive experiments on various multimodal scenarios validate the effectiveness of RollingQ and the restoration of cooperation dynamics is pivotal for enhancing the broader capabilities of widely deployed multimodal Transformers. The source code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/RollingQ_ICML2025.

Qingyang Zhang, Yake Wei, Zongbo Han et al.

Multimodal fusion focuses on integrating information from multiple modalities with the goal of more accurate prediction, which has achieved remarkable progress in a wide range of scenarios, including autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. However, the reliability of multimodal fusion remains largely unexplored especially under low-quality data settings. This paper surveys the common challenges and recent advances of multimodal fusion in the wild and presents them in a comprehensive taxonomy. From a data-centric view, we identify four main challenges that are faced by multimodal fusion on low-quality data, namely (1) noisy multimodal data that are contaminated with heterogeneous noises, (2) incomplete multimodal data that some modalities are missing, (3) imbalanced multimodal data that the qualities or properties of different modalities are significantly different and (4) quality-varying multimodal data that the quality of each modality dynamically changes with respect to different samples. This new taxonomy will enable researchers to understand the state of the field and identify several potential directions. We also provide discussion for the open problems in this field together with interesting future research directions.

Zequn Yang, Yake Wei, Ce Liang et al.

Multi-modal models have shown a promising capability to effectively integrate information from various sources, yet meanwhile, they are found vulnerable to pervasive perturbations, such as uni-modal attacks and missing conditions. To counter these perturbations, robust multi-modal representations are highly expected, which are positioned well away from the discriminative multi-modal decision boundary. In this paper, different from conventional empirical studies, we focus on a commonly used joint multi-modal framework and theoretically discover that larger uni-modal representation margins and more reliable integration for modalities are essential components for achieving higher robustness. This discovery can further explain the limitation of multi-modal robustness and the phenomenon that multi-modal models are often vulnerable to attacks on the specific modality. Moreover, our analysis reveals how the widespread issue, that the model has different preferences for modalities, limits the multi-modal robustness by influencing the essential components and could lead to attacks on the specific modality highly effective. Inspired by our theoretical finding, we introduce a training procedure called Certifiable Robust Multi-modal Training (CRMT), which can alleviate this influence from modality preference and explicitly regulate essential components to significantly improve robustness in a certifiable manner. Our method demonstrates substantial improvements in performance and robustness compared with existing methods. Furthermore, our training procedure can be easily extended to enhance other robust training strategies, highlighting its credibility and flexibility.

Meng Shen, Yake Wei, Jianxiong Yin et al.

Training multimodal models requires a large amount of labeled data. Active learning (AL) aim to reduce labeling costs. Most AL methods employ warm-start approaches, which rely on sufficient labeled data to train a well-calibrated model that can assess the uncertainty and diversity of unlabeled data. However, when assembling a dataset, labeled data are often scarce initially, leading to a cold-start problem. Additionally, most AL methods seldom address multimodal data, highlighting a research gap in this field. Our research addresses these issues by developing a two-stage method for Multi-Modal Cold-Start Active Learning (MMCSAL). Firstly, we observe the modality gap, a significant distance between the centroids of representations from different modalities, when only using cross-modal pairing information as self-supervision signals. This modality gap affects data selection process, as we calculate both uni-modal and cross-modal distances. To address this, we introduce uni-modal prototypes to bridge the modality gap. Secondly, conventional AL methods often falter in multimodal scenarios where alignment between modalities is overlooked. Therefore, we propose enhancing cross-modal alignment through regularization, thereby improving the quality of selected multimodal data pairs in AL. Finally, our experiments demonstrate MMCSAL's efficacy in selecting multimodal data pairs across three multimodal datasets.

Yake Wei, Yu Miao, Dongzhan Zhou et al.

In this paper, we reveal that most current efficient multimodal fine-tuning methods are hindered by a key limitation: they are directly borrowed from LLMs, often neglecting the intrinsic differences of multimodal scenarios and even affecting the full utilization of all modalities. Inspired by our empirical observation, we argue that unimodal adaptation and cross-modal adaptation are two essential parts for the effective fine-tuning of MLLMs. From this perspective, we propose Multimodal low-rank Adaptation (MokA), a multimodal-aware efficient fine-tuning strategy that takes multimodal characteristics into consideration. It compresses unimodal information by modality-specific parameters while explicitly enhancing cross-modal interaction, ensuring both unimodal and cross-modal adaptation. Extensive experiments cover three representative multimodal scenarios (audio-visual-text, visual-text, and speech-text), and multiple LLM backbones (LLaMA2/3, Qwen2, Qwen2.5-VL, etc). Consistent improvements indicate the efficacy and versatility of the proposed method. Ablation studies and efficiency evaluation are also conducted to fully asses our method. Overall, we think MokA provides a more targeted solution for efficient adaptation of MLLMs, paving the way for further exploration. The project page is at https://gewu-lab.github.io/MokA.

Di Hu, Yake Wei, Rui Qian et al.

Audiovisual scenes are pervasive in our daily life. It is commonplace for humans to discriminatively localize different sounding objects but quite challenging for machines to achieve class-aware sounding objects localization without category annotations, i.e., localizing the sounding object and recognizing its category. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage step-by-step learning framework to localize and recognize sounding objects in complex audiovisual scenarios using only the correspondence between audio and vision. First, we propose to determine the sounding area via coarse-grained audiovisual correspondence in the single source cases. Then visual features in the sounding area are leveraged as candidate object representations to establish a category-representation object dictionary for expressive visual character extraction. We generate class-aware object localization maps in cocktail-party scenarios and use audiovisual correspondence to suppress silent areas by referring to this dictionary. Finally, we employ category-level audiovisual consistency as the supervision to achieve fine-grained audio and sounding object distribution alignment. Experiments on both realistic and synthesized videos show that our model is superior in localizing and recognizing objects as well as filtering out silent ones. We also transfer the learned audiovisual network into the unsupervised object detection task, obtaining reasonable performance.