Group Cognition Learning: Making Everything Better Through Governed Two-Stage Agents Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper introduces Group Cognition Learning, a two-stage collaborative framework for multimodal learning that mitigates modality dominance and spurious coupling, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel governed two-stage collaboration paradigm with explicit modules to improve multimodal learning effectiveness.

Findings

GCL achieves state-of-the-art results on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and MIntRec datasets.

GCL effectively reduces modality dominance and spurious coupling.

Extensive experiments validate the design's effectiveness.

Abstract

Centralized multimodal learning commonly compresses language, acoustic, and visual signals into a single fused representation for prediction. While effective, this paradigm suffers from two limitations: modality dominance, where optimization gravitates towards the path of least resistance, ignoring weaker but informative modalities, and spurious modality coupling, where models overfit to incidental cross-modal correlations. To address these, we propose Group Cognition Learning (GCL), a governed collaboration paradigm that applies a two-stage protocol after modality-specific encoding. In Stage 1 (Selective Interaction), a Routing Agent proposes directed interaction routes, and an Auditing Agent assigns sample-wise gates to emphasize exchanges that yield positive marginal predictive gain while suppressing redundant coupling. In Stage 2 (Consensus Formation), a Public-Factor Agent maintains an explicit shared factor, and an Aggregation Agent produces the final prediction through contribution-aware weighting while keeping each modality representation as a specialization channel. Extensive experiments on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and MIntRec demonstrate that GCL mitigates dominance and coupling, establishing state-of-the-art results across both regression and classification benchmarks. Analysis experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of the design.