Exchanging-based Multimodal Fusion with Transformer
Renyu Zhu Chengcheng Han Yong Qian Qiushi Sun Xiang Li Ming Gao Xuezhi Cao Yunsen Xian
We study the problem of multimodal fusion in this paper. Recent
exchanging-based methods have been proposed for vision-vision fusion, which aim
to exchange embeddings learned from one modality to the other. However, most of
them project inputs of multimodalities into different low-dimensional spaces
and cannot be applied to the sequential input data. To solve these issues, in
this paper, we propose a novel exchanging-based multimodal fusion model MuSE
for text-vision fusion based on Transformer. We first use two encoders to
separately map multimodal inputs into different low-dimensional spaces. Then we
employ two decoders to regularize the embeddings and pull them into the same
space. The two decoders capture the correlations between texts and images with
the image captioning task and the text-to-image generation task, respectively.
Further, based on the regularized embeddings, we present CrossTransformer,
which uses two Transformer encoders with shared parameters as the backbone
model to exchange knowledge between multimodalities. Specifically,
CrossTransformer first learns the global contextual information of the inputs
in the shallow layers. After that, it performs inter-modal exchange by
selecting a proportion of tokens in one modality and replacing their embeddings
with the average of embeddings in the other modality. We conduct extensive
experiments to evaluate the performance of MuSE on the Multimodal Named Entity
Recognition task and the Multimodal Sentiment Analysis task. Our results show
the superiority of MuSE against other competitors. Our code and data are
provided at https://github.com/RecklessRonan/MuSE.