# Self-Supervised Multimodal Learning: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01008 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01008/

## Key facts

- Cited by 58 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 187 of its 240 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 187)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Safety Fine-Tuning at (Almost) No Cost: A Baseline for Vision Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02207/) (2024)
- [Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13721/) (2023)
- [OmniSat: Self-Supervised Modality Fusion for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08351/) (2024)
- [SNIP: Bridging Mathematical Symbolic and Numeric Realms with Unified Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02227/) (2023)
- [What to align in multimodal contrastive learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07402/) (2024)
- [1000 Layer Networks for Self-Supervised RL: Scaling Depth Can Enable New Goal-Reaching Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14858/) (2025)
- [VL-ICL Bench: The Devil in the Details of Multimodal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13164/) (2024)
- [INQUIRE: A Natural World Text-to-Image Retrieval Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02537/) (2024)
- [Causal Representation Learning Made Identifiable by Grouping of Observational Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15709/) (2023)
- [The Evolution of Dataset Distillation: Toward Scalable and Generalizable Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05673/) (2025)
- [Fool Your (Vision and) Language Model With Embarrassingly Simple Permutations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01651/) (2023)
- [Advances in Multimodal Adaptation and Generalization: From Traditional Approaches to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18592/) (2025)
- [Principled Multimodal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17343/) (2025)
- [Demonstrating and Reducing Shortcuts in Vision-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17510/) (2024)
- [To Align or Not to Align: Strategic Multimodal Representation Alignment for Optimal Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12121/) (2025)
- [LANISTR: Multimodal Learning from Structured and Unstructured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16556/) (2023)
- [Textualized and Feature-based Models for Compound Multimodal Emotion Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12927/) (2024)
- [InfMasking: Unleashing Synergistic Information by Contrastive Multimodal Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25270/) (2025)
- [EgoSonics: Generating Synchronized Audio for Silent Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20592/) (2024)
- [FLAIR-HUB: Large-scale Multimodal Dataset for Land Cover and Crop Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07080/) (2025)
- [Can Self-Supervised Representation Learning Methods Withstand Distribution Shifts and Corruptions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02525/) (2023)
- [Prompt Me Up: Unleashing the Power of Alignments for Multimodal Entity and Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16822/) (2023)
- [Advancing Drug Discovery with Enhanced Chemical Understanding via Asymmetric Contrastive Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06456/) (2023)
- [Improving Generalizability and Undetectability for Targeted Adversarial Attacks on Multimodal Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19994/) (2025)
- [QuAnTS: Question Answering on Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05124/) (2025)
- [Vertical Federated Learning in Practice: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08160/) (2025)
- [Tables Guide Vision: Learning to See the Heart through Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14998/) (2025)
- [Ground-V: Teaching VLMs to Ground Complex Instructions in Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13788/) (2025)
- [PreFM: Online Audio-Visual Event Parsing via Predictive Future Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23155/) (2025)
- [Forging Spatial Intelligence: A Roadmap of Multi-Modal Data Pre-Training for Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24385/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal learning, which aims to understand and analyze information from multiple modalities, has achieved substantial progress in the supervised regime in recent years. However, the heavy dependence on data paired with expensive human annotations impedes scaling up models. Meanwhile, given the availability of large-scale unannotated data in the wild, self-supervised learning has become an attractive strategy to alleviate the annotation bottleneck. Building on these two directions, self-supervised multimodal learning (SSML) provides ways to learn from raw multimodal data. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in SSML, in which we elucidate three major challenges intrinsic to self-supervised learning with multimodal data: (1) learning representations from multimodal data without labels, (2) fusion of different modalities, and (3) learning with unaligned data. We then detail existing solutions to these challenges. Specifically, we consider (1) objectives for learning from multimodal unlabeled data via self-supervision, (2) model architectures from the perspective of different multimodal fusion strategies, and (3) pair-free learning strategies for coarse-grained and fine-grained alignment. We also review real-world applications of SSML algorithms in diverse fields such as healthcare, remote sensing, and machine translation. Finally, we discuss challenges and future directions for SSML. A collection of related resources can be found at: https://github.com/ys-zong/awesome-self-supervised-multimodal-learning.