# Borrowing Treasures from Neighbors: In-Context Learning for Multimodal Learning with Missing Modalities and Data Scarcity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09428 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09428/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00083/) (2023)
- [VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07533/) (2023)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13884/) (2021)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04790/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [What Makes Training Multi-Modal Classification Networks Hard?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12681/) (2019)
- [Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02499/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompting via Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00647/) (2022)
- [SMIL: Multimodal Learning with Severely Missing Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05677/) (2021)
- [SegGPT: Segmenting Everything In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03284/) (2023)
- [Are Multimodal Transformers Robust to Missing Modality?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05454/) (2022)
- [Learning Factorized Multimodal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06176/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12309/) (2020)
- [Speak Foreign Languages with Your Own Voice: Cross-Lingual Neural Codec Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03926/) (2023)
- [What Makes Multi-modal Learning Better than Single (Provably)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04538/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Deep Multimodal Learning with Missing Modality: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07825/) (2024)
- [Seeing and Reasoning with Confidence: Supercharging Multimodal LLMs with an Uncertainty-Aware Agentic Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08308/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Learning-Guided Retrieval with Soft Fusion for Robust Multimodal Imitation Learning under Missing Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15514/) (2026)
- [A Clinical Point Cloud Paradigm for In-Hospital Mortality Prediction from Multi-Level Incomplete Multimodal EHRs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04614/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15743/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 method demonstrates an average improvement of 6.1% over a recent strong baseline across various datasets and missing states. Notably, our method also reduces the performance gap between full-modality and missing-modality data compared with the baseline.