{"paper":{"title":"A Closer Look at Multimodal Representation Collapse","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","cs.CV"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Abhra Chaudhuri, Anjan Dutta, Serban Georgescu, Tu Bui","submitted_at":"2025-05-28T15:31:53Z","abstract_excerpt":"We aim to develop a fundamental understanding of modality collapse, a recently observed empirical phenomenon wherein models trained for multimodal fusion tend to rely only on a subset of the modalities, ignoring the rest. We show that modality collapse happens when noisy features from one modality are entangled, via a shared set of neurons in the fusion head, with predictive features from another, effectively masking out positive contributions from the predictive features of the former modality and leading to its collapse. We further prove that cross-modal knowledge distillation implicitly dis"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2505.22483","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2505.22483/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}