Balanced Multimodal Learning via On-the-Fly Gradient Modulation

Xiaokang Peng, Yake Wei, Andong Deng, Dong Wang, Di Hu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 8238-8247

Audio-visual 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 multi-modal model outperforms its uni-modal counterpart. Specifically, in this paper we point out that existing audio-visual 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 audio-visual tasks, and this simple strategy can also boost existing multi-modal methods, which illustrates its efficacy and versatility.