When Does Quality-Aware Multimodal Fusion Matter? A Leakage-Safe Diagnostic for Decision-Level Dependence
Mirrored from arXiv — Machine Learning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Machine Learning
Title:When Does Quality-Aware Multimodal Fusion Matter? A Leakage-Safe Diagnostic for Decision-Level Dependence
Abstract:Many multimodal systems estimate the reliability of each modality and weight their contributions to the final prediction. However, it remains unclear whether these scores influence model decisions or merely correlate with performance. We propose a simple diagnostic to test whether reliability information is used during inference. After training, the model and inputs are fixed while reliability scores are permuted across test examples. If predictions depend on these scores, performance should degrade. Experiments on StressID for stress recognition and CMU-MOSEI for sentiment analysis show that permuting reliability scores leaves performance unchanged despite substantial potential gains from selecting the best modality per example. In positive controls where reliability signals identify the correct modality, the same frozen fusion rules yield significant improvements, indicating that reliability signals influence fused decisions only when they reliably predict unimodal correctness.
| Comments: | Accepted to INTERSPEECH 2026. 5 pages, 1 figure, 5 tables |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.26473 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2606.26473v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.26473
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
Current browse context:
References & Citations
Bookmark
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — Machine Learning
-
Can AI Draw Science? A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Figure Generation by Text-to-Image and Multimodal Models
Jun 30
-
On the Necessity of a Liquid Substrate for Mesh Intelligence
Jun 30
-
Position: RL Researchers Need to Distinguish Between Solving Simulators and Using Simulators as a Proxy
Jun 30
-
Learning to Distributedly Estimate under Partially Known Dynamics: A Covariance-Agnostic Neural Kalman Consensus Filter
Jun 30
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.