MODfinity: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Multimodal Information Flow Intertwining

Abstract

Multimodal unsupervised domain adaptation leverages unlabeled data in the target domain to enhance multimodal systems continuously. While current state-of-the-art methods encourage interaction between sub-models of different modalities through pseudo-labeling and feature-level exchange, varying sample quality across modalities can lead to the propagation of inaccurate information, resulting in error accumulation. To address this, we propose Modal-Affinity Multimodal Domain Adaptation (MODfinity), a method that dynamically manages multimodal information flow through fine-grained control over teacher model selection, guiding information intertwining at both feature and label levels. By treating labels as an independent modality, MODfinity enables balanced performance assessment across modalities, employing a novel modal-affinity measurement to evaluate information quality. Additionally, we introduce a modal-affinity distillation technique to control sample-level information exchange, ensuring reliable multimodal interaction based on affinity evaluations within the feature space. Extensive experiments on three multimodal datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in high-noise environments.