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Conditional learning speeds

Conditional learning speeds refer to metrics in multimodal machine learning that quantify the rate or pace at which a neural network acquires information from an individual input modality during training relative to the presence of other modalities. Introduced as a computationally efficient proxy for conditional utilization rates—which measure the incremental performance gain obtained by adding a modality—these speeds assess how rapidly each data stream contributes to the learning process. An imbalance in conditional learning speeds typically indicates that a model is greedily optimizing and relying predominantly on a faster or more easily learnable modality while underfitting and underutilizing the others. By monitoring and dynamically balancing these speeds across all input streams during optimization, multimodal architectures can prevent single-modality dominance and achieve more robust feature representation and generalization.

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Characterizing and Overcoming the Greedy Nature of Learning in Multi-modal Deep Neural Networks

Characterizing and Overcoming the Greedy Nature of Learning in Multi-modal Deep Neural Networks

Nan Wu, Stanislaw Jastrzebski, Kyunghyun Cho, Krzysztof J. Geras

OrganizationsCIFARGenentechNew York University

Why you should read this

Explains why multi-modal neural networks often over-rely on a single modality and introduces a training algorithm that balances learning speeds across modalities to improve overall generalization.

We hypothesize that due to the greedy nature of learning in multi-modal deep neural networks, these models tend to rely on just one modality while under-fitting the other modalities. Such behavior is counter-intuitive and hurts the models’ generalization, as we observe empirically. To estimate the model’s dependence on each modality, we compute the gain on the accuracy when the model has access to it in addition to another modality. We refer to this gain as the conditional utilization rate. In the experiments, we consistently observe an imbalance in conditional utilization rates between modalities, across multiple tasks and architectures. Since conditional utilization rate cannot be computed efficiently during training, we introduce a proxy for it based on the pace at which the model learns from each modality, which we refer to as the conditional learning speed. We propose an algorithm to balance the conditional learning speeds between modalities during training and demonstrate that it indeed addresses the issue of greedy learning.1 The proposed algorithm improves the model’s generalization on three datasets: Colored MNIST, ModelNet40, and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand Gesture.

Added

2026-09-26