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Borrowing treasures from neighbors: In-context learning for multimodal learning with missing modalities and data scarcity

Zhi, Zhuo; Liu, Ziquan; Elbadawi, Moe; Daneshmend, Adam; Orlu, Mine; Basit, Abdul; Demosthenous, Andreas; (2025) Borrowing treasures from neighbors: In-context learning for multimodal learning with missing modalities and data scarcity. Neurocomputing , 647 , Article 130502. 10.1016/j.neucom.2025.130502. Green open access

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Abstract

Multimodal machine learning with missing modalities is an increasingly relevant challenge arising in various applications such as healthcare. This paper extends the current research into missing modalities to the low-data regime, i.e., a downstream task has both missing modalities and limited sample size issues. This problem setting is particularly challenging and also practical as it is often expensive to get full-modality data and sufficient annotated training samples. We propose to use retrieval-augmented in-context learning to address these two crucial issues by unleashing the potential of a transformer’s in-context learning ability. Diverging from existing methods, which primarily belong to the parametric paradigm and often require sufficient training samples, our work exploits the value of the available full-modality data, offering a novel perspective on resolving the challenge. The proposed data-dependent framework exhibits a higher degree of sample efficiency and is empirically demonstrated to enhance the classification model’s performance on both full- and missing-modality data in the low-data regime across various multimodal learning tasks. When only 1% of the training data are available, our proposed ICL-CA method outperforms the best baseline by 5.9%, 5.9%, 5.3% and 10.8% on four datasets across various missing states. Notably, our method also reduces the performance gap between full-modality and missing-modality data compared with the baseline. Code is available1.

Type: Article
Title: Borrowing treasures from neighbors: In-context learning for multimodal learning with missing modalities and data scarcity
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.neucom.2025.130502
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2025.130502
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Multimodal learning; Missing modalities; Data scarcity; In-context learning
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > UCL School of Pharmacy
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Electronic and Electrical Eng
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > UCL School of Pharmacy > Pharmaceutics
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10209939
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