# Found in Translation: Learning Robust Joint Representations by Cyclic Translations Between Modalities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07809 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07809/

## Key facts

- Cited by 149 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 149)

- [Learning Audio-Visual Speech Representation by Masked Multimodal Cluster Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02184/) (2022)
- [SMIL: Multimodal Learning with Severely Missing Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05677/) (2021)
- [Are Multimodal Transformers Robust to Missing Modality?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05454/) (2022)
- [MultiBench: Multiscale Benchmarks for Multimodal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07502/) (2021)
- [Improving Multimodal Fusion with Hierarchical Mutual Information Maximization for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00412/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Prompting with Missing Modalities for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03369/) (2023)
- [Foundations and Trends in Multimodal Machine Learning: Principles, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03430/) (2022)
- [Generalized Multimodal ELBO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02470/) (2021)
- [GCNet: Graph Completion Network for Incomplete Multimodal Learning in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02177/) (2022)
- [Decoupled Multimodal Distilling for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13802/) (2023)
- [On Uni-Modal Feature Learning in Supervised Multi-Modal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01233/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Information Bottleneck: Learning Minimal Sufficient Unimodal and Multimodal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17444/) (2022)
- [SimMMDG: A Simple and Effective Framework for Multi-modal Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19795/) (2023)
- [Bi-Bimodal Modality Fusion for Correlation-Controlled Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13669/) (2021)
- [LiRA: Learning Visual Speech Representations from Audio through Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09171/) (2021)
- [Exploiting BERT For Multimodal Target Sentiment Classification Through Input Space Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01682/) (2021)
- [Hybrid Contrastive Learning of Tri-Modal Representation for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01797/) (2021)
- [Trustworthy Multimodal Regression with Mixture of Normal-inverse Gamma Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08456/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Learning using Optimal Transport for Sarcasm and Humor Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10949/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Co-learning: Challenges, Applications with Datasets, Recent Advances and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13782/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-modal Conversational Emotion Recognition with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05735/) (2023)
- [Correlation-Decoupled Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Incomplete Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16456/) (2024)
- [Coupled Mamba: Enhanced Multi-modal Fusion with Coupled State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18014/) (2024)
- [M2Lens: Visualizing and Explaining Multimodal Models for Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08264/) (2021)
- [Tag-assisted Multimodal Sentiment Analysis under Uncertain Missing Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13707/) (2022)
- [Towards Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Debiasing via Bias Purification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05023/) (2024)
- [DLF: Disentangled-Language-Focused Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12225/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Prompt Learning with Missing Modalities for Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05374/) (2024)
- [Tailor Versatile Multi-modal Learning for Multi-label Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05834/) (2022)
- [COLD Fusion: Calibrated and Ordinal Latent Distribution Fusion for Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05833/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal sentiment analysis is a core research area that studies speaker sentiment expressed from the language, visual, and acoustic modalities. The central challenge in multimodal learning involves inferring joint representations that can process and relate information from these modalities. However, existing work learns joint representations by requiring all modalities as input and as a result, the learned representations may be sensitive to noisy or missing modalities at test time. With the recent success of sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) models in machine translation, there is an opportunity to explore new ways of learning joint representations that may not require all input modalities at test time. In this paper, we propose a method to learn robust joint representations by translating between modalities. Our method is based on the key insight that translation from a source to a target modality provides a method of learning joint representations using only the source modality as input. We augment modality translations with a cycle consistency loss to ensure that our joint representations retain maximal information from all modalities. Once our translation model is trained with paired multimodal data, we only need data from the source modality at test time for final sentiment prediction. This ensures that our model remains robust from perturbations or missing information in the other modalities. We train our model with a coupled translation-prediction objective and it achieves new state-of-the-art results on multimodal sentiment analysis datasets: CMU-MOSI, ICT-MMMO, and YouTube. Additional experiments show that our model learns increasingly discriminative joint representations with more input modalities while maintaining robustness to missing or perturbed modalities.