Set-CLIP: Exploring Aligned Semantic From Low-Alignment Multimodal Data Through A Distribution View

Abstract: Multimodal fusion breaks through the boundaries between diverse modalities and has already achieved notable performances. However, in many specialized fields, it is struggling to obtain sufficient alignment data for training, which seriously limits the use of previously effective models. Therefore, semi-supervised learning approaches are attempted to facilitate multimodal alignment by learning from low-alignment data with fewer matched pairs, but traditional techniques like pseudo-labeling may run into troubles in the label-deficient scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we reframe semi-supervised multimodal alignment as a manifold matching issue and propose a new methodology based on CLIP, termed Set-CLIP. Specifically, by designing a novel semantic density distribution loss, we constrain the latent representation distribution with fine granularity and extract implicit semantic alignment from unpaired multimodal data, thereby reducing the reliance on numerous strictly matched pairs. Furthermore, we apply coarse-grained modality adaptation and unimodal self-supervised guidance to narrow the gaps between modality spaces and improve the stability of representation distributions. Extensive experiments conducted on a range of tasks in various fields, including protein analysis, remote sensing, and the general vision-language field, validate the efficacy of our proposed Set-CLIP method. Especially with no paired data for supervised training, Set-CLIP is still outstanding, which brings an improvement of 144.83% over CLIP.