Learning Modality Knowledge Alignment for Cross-Modality Transfer

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the gap between different data modalities affects transfer learning and introduces MoNA, a meta-learning method to align modality knowledge, improving cross-modality transfer performance.

Contribution

It formalizes the modality gap as knowledge misalignment and proposes MoNA to reduce this gap through target data transformation, enhancing transfer effectiveness.

Findings

Larger modality gaps lead to less effective knowledge transfer.

MoNA improves knowledge reuse in cross-modality transfer.

Experimental results outperform existing finetuning methods.

Abstract

Cross-modality transfer aims to leverage large pretrained models to complete tasks that may not belong to the modality of pretraining data. Existing works achieve certain success in extending classical finetuning to cross-modal scenarios, yet we still lack understanding about the influence of modality gap on the transfer. In this work, a series of experiments focusing on the source representation quality during transfer are conducted, revealing the connection between larger modality gap and lesser knowledge reuse which means ineffective transfer. We then formalize the gap as the knowledge misalignment between modalities using conditional distribution P(Y|X). Towards this problem, we present Modality kNowledge Alignment (MoNA), a meta-learning approach that learns target data transformation to reduce the modality knowledge discrepancy ahead of the transfer. Experiments show that out method enables better reuse of source modality knowledge in cross-modality transfer, which leads to improvements upon existing finetuning methods.