Dependency, Compression, and Synergy: A Unified Information-Theoretic View of Multimodal Learning

2026-09-13

AI Summary

该论文通过互信息、信息瓶颈和部分信息分解等方法，从信息论角度统一理解多模态学习中的依赖、压缩与协同问题。

Abstract

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models have intensified the need to understand how different modalities share, preserve, and complement information. Mutual Information (MI), the Information Bottleneck (IB), and Partial Information Decomposition (PID) provide complementary perspectives, yet existing studies often treat them as isolated tools. This survey presents an information-theoretic perspective connecting these principles as progressively refined views of multimodal information processing: MI characterizes inter-modal dependency, IB explains task-oriented information preservation under compression, and PID decomposes preserved information into redundancy, uniqueness, and synergy. We review 170 recent studies (2018--2026) and 12 foundational works, organizing multimodal learning around four challenges: cross-modal alignment, information-efficient fusion, interaction-type characterization, and scaling to multimodal foundation models. Rather than using application domains as primary taxonomy axes, we interpret healthcare, robotics, recommendation systems, affective computing, and wireless communications as empirical validations of these information principles. Beyond taxonomy, we organize existing multimodal paradigms within a single information-theoretic coordinate system -- the Generalized Multimodal Information Lagrangian -- in which they occupy exact or approximate parameter corners, and whose unoccupied regions name candidate method families the literature has not yet built. We further discuss how emerging multimodal foundation models instantiate these principles at scale and identify open challenges including scalable information estimation in high-dimensional settings, standardized evaluation across information-theoretic methods, combinatorial complexity of multimodal PID, and the transition from post-hoc information analysis toward information-aware multimodal learning.

Problem

• multimodal learning
• information-theoretic
• mutual information
• information bottleneck
• partial information decomposition

Innovation

• Multimodal Learning
• Information-Theoretic Perspective
• Generalized Multimodal Information Lagrangian
• Cross-Modal Alignment
• Scalable Information Estimation