MDA: An Interpretable Multi-Modal Fusion with Missing Modalities and Intrinsic Noise

Lin Fan, Yafei Ou, Cenyang Zheng, Pengyu Dai, Tamotsu Kamishima, Masayuki Ikebe, Kenji Suzuki, Xun Gong

Abstract: Multi-modal learning has shown exceptional performance in various tasks, especially in medical applications, where it integrates diverse medical information for comprehensive diagnostic evidence. However, there still are several challenges in multi-modal learning, 1. Heterogeneity between modalities, 2. uncertainty in missing modalities, 3. influence of intrinsic noise, and 4. interpretability for fusion result. This paper introduces the Modal-Domain Attention (MDA) model to address the above challenges. MDA constructs linear relationships between modalities through continuous attention, due to its ability to adaptively allocate dynamic attention to different modalities, MDA can reduce attention to low-correlation data, missing modalities, or modalities with inherent noise, thereby maintaining SOTA performance across various tasks on multiple public datasets. Furthermore, our observations on the contribution of different modalities indicate that MDA aligns with established clinical diagnostic imaging gold standards and holds promise as a reference for pathologies where these standards are not yet clearly defined. The code and dataset will be available.