Meta-Transformer: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Learning

Yiyuan Zhang, Kaixiong Gong, Kaipeng Zhang, Hongsheng Li, Yu Qiao, Wanli Ouyang, Xiangyu Yue

Keywords: Unified Multimodal Learning

Abstract: Multimodal learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. Despite years of development in this field, it still remains challenging to design a unified network for processing various modalities ($\textit{e.g.}$ natural language, 2D images, 3D point clouds, audio, video, time series, tabular data) due to the inherent gaps among them. In this work, we propose a framework, named Meta-Transformer, that leverages a $\textbf{frozen}$ encoder to perform multimodal perception without any paired multimodal training data. In Meta-Transformer, the raw input data from various modalities are mapped into a shared token space, allowing a subsequent encoder with frozen parameters to extract high-level semantic features of the input data. Composed of three main components: a unified data tokenizer, a modality-shared encoder, and task-specific heads for downstream tasks, Meta-Transformer is the first framework to perform unified learning across 12 modalities with unpaired data. Experiments on different benchmarks reveal that Meta-Transformer can handle a wide range of tasks including fundamental perception (text, image, point cloud, audio, video), practical application (X-Ray, infrared, hyperspectral, and IMU), and data mining (graph, tabular, and time-series). Meanwhile, it also excels in multimodal understanding on cross-modal retrieval, referring segmentation, and grounding tasks. Meta-Transformer indicates a promising future for developing unified multimodal intelligence with transformers. We will release well-documented code and pretrained weights soon.

Primary Area: representation learning for computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

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Submission Number: 4552