Multi-modal Learning with Missing Modality via Shared-Specific Feature Modelling
It addresses a critical issue for multi-modal learning in domains like medical imaging and computer vision, offering a simpler and more adaptable solution compared to existing incremental approaches.
The paper tackles the missing modality problem in multi-modal models by proposing the Shared-Specific Feature Modelling (ShaSpec) method, which learns shared and specific features to handle missing modalities during both training and evaluation, resulting in performance improvements such as over 3-5% gains on BraTS2018 segmentation tasks.
The missing modality issue is critical but non-trivial to be solved by multi-modal models. Current methods aiming to handle the missing modality problem in multi-modal tasks, either deal with missing modalities only during evaluation or train separate models to handle specific missing modality settings. In addition, these models are designed for specific tasks, so for example, classification models are not easily adapted to segmentation tasks and vice versa. In this paper, we propose the Shared-Specific Feature Modelling (ShaSpec) method that is considerably simpler and more effective than competing approaches that address the issues above. ShaSpec is designed to take advantage of all available input modalities during training and evaluation by learning shared and specific features to better represent the input data. This is achieved from a strategy that relies on auxiliary tasks based on distribution alignment and domain classification, in addition to a residual feature fusion procedure. Also, the design simplicity of ShaSpec enables its easy adaptation to multiple tasks, such as classification and segmentation. Experiments are conducted on both medical image segmentation and computer vision classification, with results indicating that ShaSpec outperforms competing methods by a large margin. For instance, on BraTS2018, ShaSpec improves the SOTA by more than 3% for enhancing tumour, 5% for tumour core and 3% for whole tumour. The code repository address is https://github.com/billhhh/ShaSpec/.