DAIF: A Data-Driven Intermediate Fusion Framework for Multimodal Supervised Learning via Approximate Message Passing

Abstract

Multimodal supervised learning seeks to leverage multiple heterogeneous data sources to improve predictive performance. A central challenge is determining the fusion granularity across modalities: over-integration may amplify noise while under-integration fails to exploit cross-modal dependence. Existing approaches rely on pre-specified fusion architectures, from early to late fusion, that may not adapt to the underlying dependence structure among modalities. We propose DAIF, a data adaptive intermediate fusion framework that combines random matrix theory and non-parametric dependence measures to learn fusion structure directly from data. We operate under a Bayesian multimodal factor model where the prior on the latent factors determines the cross-modal dependence. Our method clusters modalities based on estimated intermodal dependence, then performs clusterwise empirical Bayes estimation of the priors. These estimated priors are used to construct denoisers within an approximate message passing (AMP) framework, yielding denoised low-dimensional features that borrow strength across related modalities while preserving modality-specific signal. The resulting embeddings are used for downstream supervised prediction. We evaluate the framework through simulations under varying dependence structures and signal regimes, comparing against several benchmark methods, and demonstrate its practical utility on two multimodal datasets, namely a trimodal TEA-seq dataset (Swanson et al., 2021) and TCGA-BRCA dataset (Goldman et al., 2020). In the first example, we predict the expression level of a T-cell differentiation marker protein and in the second case we analyze patient survival prediction based on multimodal information. Our method competes with or outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in both prediction problems, demonstrating its versatility across diverse supervised learning tasks.