Mind the Gap: A Framework for Assessing Pitfalls in Multimodal Active Learning
This work identifies critical pitfalls in multimodal active learning, which is incremental as it benchmarks existing methods without proposing new solutions.
The paper tackled the problem of active learning in multimodal settings, where existing methods fail to address challenges like missing modalities and imbalanced representations, showing that multimodal strategies do not consistently outperform unimodal ones on synthetic and real-world datasets.
Multimodal learning enables neural networks to integrate information from heterogeneous sources, but active learning in this setting faces distinct challenges. These include missing modalities, differences in modality difficulty, and varying interaction structures. These are issues absent in the unimodal case. While the behavior of active learning strategies in unimodal settings is well characterized, their behavior under such multimodal conditions remains poorly understood. We introduce a new framework for benchmarking multimodal active learning that isolates these pitfalls using synthetic datasets, allowing systematic evaluation without confounding noise. Using this framework, we compare unimodal and multimodal query strategies and validate our findings on two real-world datasets. Our results show that models consistently develop imbalanced representations, relying primarily on one modality while neglecting others. Existing query methods do not mitigate this effect, and multimodal strategies do not consistently outperform unimodal ones. These findings highlight limitations of current active learning methods and underline the need for modality-aware query strategies that explicitly address these pitfalls. Code and benchmark resources will be made publicly available.