让多模态大模型在推理时用不到的辅助模态,也能提升性能。
Mixture of Probes: Learning from Privileged Modalities in Multimodal LLMs Through Probing

- 通过探针机制分离模态特有与通用信息,实现结构保留与跨模态迁移。
- 在8个任务中相对基线最高提升65%,验证了辅助模态的有效性。
- 适合需要利用训练期额外信息的多模态场景,如医疗、遥感等。
多模态大语言模型通常假设训练和推理时所有模态均可用,但许多真实场景中仅训练阶段可访问辅助模态(即特权模态)。现有模型因将模态视为可互换输入,难以有效利用这些信息。本文提出Mixture of Probes(MoP),通过结构化探针机制从共享编码器的中间层提取并组织信息,而非依赖最终层对齐,实现模态特有结构保留与跨模态可迁移表示学习。为此引入MoP-X训练策略,以探针解耦损失防止探针坍塌并促进跨模态学习。在涵盖四个模态、八个任务的综合评估中,每个模态独立作为推理输入,MoP持续优于强基线,最高实现65%相对提升,证明即便推理时不可用,辅助模态仍可通过有效训练带来显著收益。代码、模型及评估协议将开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are typically designed under the assumption that all modalities available during training will also be accessible at inference. However, many real-world settings violate this assumption, requiring models to operate under a privileged modality setting, where auxiliary modalities are available only during training. While these modalities contain valuable information, existing MLLMs largely fail to leverage them effectively, as they treat modalities as interchangeable inputs rather than sources of complementary supervision. We propose Mixture of Probes (MoP), a novel framework that disentangles modality-specific and modality-general signals within the MLLM, allowing the model to preserve modality-dependent structure while learning transferable representations across modalities. At its core, MoP achieves this through a structured probing mechanism that extracts and organizes information from intermediate representations of a shared modality encoder, rather than relying only on final-layer alignment as done in existing MLLMs. To support this disentanglement, we further introduce MoP Cross-modal Training (MoP-X), a training strategy for MoP centered around a probe disentanglement loss that prevents probe collapse and encourages cross-modal learning. We evaluate MoP across two domains spanning eight tasks and four modalities under a comprehensive evaluation protocol tailored to the privileged modality setting, where each modality is independently treated as the sole input at inference time. MoP consistently outperforms strong MLLM baselines, achieving up to 65% relative improvement, demonstrating that auxiliary modalities, even when unavailable at inference, can provide substantial gains when effectively leveraged during training. Code, model checkpoints, and evaluation protocols will be made available at https://github.com/Sony/MoP.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。